A man in a sweater vest, a $19-million-a-year man, stands in front of a camera, picking up a burger with both hands, and takes a tentative, hestitant nibble. He calls it a product. He says "Holy cow." He shoves it toward the camera as proof of the carnage. He has consumed, by one generous estimate, 2.3% of the burger. The internet loses its collective mind.

In the same week that video went viral (a full month after it was posted, let that settle) the United States and Israel launched coordinated airstrikes on Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, triggering retaliatory drone and missile attacks across the Gulf, closing airspace from Tehran to Dubai, stranding tens of thousands of travelers, and beginning what Trump himself has predicted will be a four-week war.

Both things happened. Which do you think people discuss online more?

There are hydraulics to our collective attention. The way it flows toward the low-pressure zones of absurdity while the high-pressure catastrophes sit there, enormous and unprocessed, waiting for us to come back.

Are we coming back?

The Product

McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski posted a video to Instagram on February 3rd, over a month ago, of himself taste-testing the chain's new flagship sandwich, the Big Arch. Ad copy would speak of patties, white cheddar, crispy onions, pickles, lettuce. A slop sauce on a sesame-poppy seed bun. A serious burger. A 1,020-calorie undertaking. The kind of thing that requires commitment.

He did not commit.

The video is accidental honesty The man calls the burger "unique," describes the "gooeyness" and "of course, we've got the pickles." Without elaboration, as if the pickles require no further comment, as if their presence is simply a cosmic given, like gravity. Then, he takes a bite so cautious it reads as a man defusing something. He refers to the food as "the product" and "this thing." He declares it "so good." He promises he will be finishing it for lunch.

Then, the fast food CEO arms race began.

Burger King posted a video of its president eating a Whopper. Wendy's U.S. president followed on LinkedIn. Buffalo Wild Wings dropped their own burger photo with a caption that simply said: "we love this product."

McDonald's official Instagram leaned in, captioning a Big Arch photo with "Take a bite of our new product. Can't believe this got approved." The clip has cleared 4.5 million views.

The information ecosystem is designed to find content like this that's universally legible, that requires no prior knowledge, no emotional armouring, no capacity to sit with complexity, and to feed it back to us in an endless loop until the cycle refreshes.

Meanwhile

Since February 28th, the United States and Israel have conducted approximately 2,000 strikes on Iran, targeting leadership, military infrastructure, and nuclear sites in what the US has codenamed Operation Epic Fury and Israel has named Operation Roaring Lion. The strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, whose compound was destroyed in the opening hours. As of today, March 5th, 2026, the death toll stands at over 1,230 people, with more than 6,000 wounded. Iran has launched retaliatory drone and missile strikes across the Gulf, targeting US military bases in Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Iraq. An Iranian missile entered Turkish airspace and was intercepted by NATO air defences. A US submarine has sunk an Iranian warship off the coast of Sri Lanka — the first ship sunk by a submarine in active combat since the Falklands War. Three US jets were mistakenly shot down by Kuwait's own air defences. Six American service members are dead.

Trump has said the war could last four weeks. The Senate voted down a war powers resolution that would have required him to seek congressional approval. Spain has refused to let the US use its military bases, and Trump threatened to cut off all trade with Spain in response. The UN atomic energy agency has warned of "increasing risk to nuclear safety" in the region.

Executive Orders

In early January, Trump floated the idea of canceling the 2026 midterm elections, remarks the White House later dismissed as "facetious." Then PBS News obtained a 17-page draft executive order that would give the president extraordinary authority over the November elections, requiring hand-counting of ballots, mandating re-registration with proof of citizenship, citing alleged foreign interference as justification for what critics immediately identified as a seizure of power over an election system the Constitution explicitly assigns to states. When asked about the draft, Trump said: "Who told you that?" Illinois Governor JB Pritzker responded on X: "Donald, you're not denying it."

CNN reported that Trump's administration has already begun rewiring the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division away from its original mission, with a current focus on "cleaning" voter rolls, a project a judge recently ruled was a misapplication of the Civil Rights Act. Democrats are currently polling at 80% odds to win the House. Trump has already said the US "shouldn't even have an election" in 2026.

The United States is ranked third globally for civil unrest risk, with the sharpest increase in monthly protest size of any country. From an average of 172,000 people at the end of 2024 to 696,000 a year later. DOGE has triggered nationwide protests across all 50 states. In January, an ICE agent fatally shot 37-year-old woman Renée Good in her car. The protest that followed drew hundreds. The counter-response drew tear gas canisters that rolled under a family's car and set off airbags with a six-month-old baby inside.

This is the week that the Big Arch ate the news cycle.

The Civil Mechanics of the Bite

I want to be careful and articulate that I'm not asking you to press your face to the screen of horror and atrocity you have no power over. The unregulated Internet (such as the defunct LiveLeak) has already done a fantastic job of numbing and desensitizing us to the violent horrors.

We need the opposite, to reconnect to our humanity. To understand that people across the world matter just as much as those we see daily and know by name. There is no acceptable level of civilian causality in any situation.

There are many current, active, ongoing atrocities I could point to. and I think at some point the listing off itself becomes a numbing agent if only from overwhelm alone.

While we point and laugh (or feel righteous fury) at the robotic, uncanny reaction of a multimillionaire unable to competently eat a burger, we must remember why. We are the ones who struggle paying for our rent, our medicine, our well-being. We think to ourselves, how could we possibly respond to yet another imperial military intervention in SWANA committed by those trafficking women and children among one another?

There isn't a simple, easy answer. Our apathy is kicking the proverbial can down the road.

The corporate-speak that calls a sandwich "the product" reveals the horror in the distance between the executive class and the things they sell. The distance between them and the people who eat them. Corporate CEOs cannot help but lose their humanity.. No longer knowing the burger as a thing you shove in your mouth. The burger is market share and net promoter score. The timid bite a symptom of pathology.

But the video was posted on February 3rd. It sat there, unnoticed, for three and a half weeks. It went viral on approximately February 25th, the same week the US was publicly threatening Iran with a 10-day countdown to military action, and three days before the bombs actually started falling.

We have built information systems that are extraordinarily bad at keeping us with the dense and the demanding. A man nibbling a burger is universally legible. 1,230 dead in Iran requires you to know something about the history of US-Iranian relations, about nuclear negotiations, about the 2025-2026 Iranian protests where human rights activists counted at least 6,126 people shot dead before the US started bombing. It requires you to hold moral complexity, to simultaneously reckon with a brutal theocracy that was massacring protesters and a military strike that is also killing civilians, in numbers that are still not fully verified because the nation cut all internet access in January.

It requires grief. It requires the capacity to sit with not knowing what comes next.

The burger will always win. And each week the conversation is about a burger is a week it is not about a war powers resolution that failed in the Senate.

Wars require public consent, or at least public passivity. Passivity is easy to manufacture when the public is busy arguing about whether a CEO is allergic to his own food.

Trump's approval rating is underwater on every issue. A 17-page document is circulating among pro-Trump activists outlining how to use a declared national emergency to seize control of the voting process. His chief of staff has been on record saying they know presidents lose power after the first two years, which is why they've been moving at "breakneck speed." The window is closing.

The Last Thing They Can Take From Us

I think wealth has been hoarded to such absurd extremes that those in power look for other exploitation and extraction. The plutocracy of oligarchs have functionally funnelled economies into their back pockets. What is left?

Us. Our time. Our attention. This remains the still-valuable coal burning the furnace, warming the beast of the belly.

I'm sure you're exhausted by burger CEOs, I'm sure you're exhausted of metacommentary like this, too. I want you to disengage after you finish reading, or maybe even right now. For the longer we stare at our screens, whether in amusement or outrage, the less time we have to organize. The less time we have to plan and prepare and resist and fight back.

I've written before about specific, actionable steps we can all start taking, so I won't repeat myself, but know that you have far more power than you think. The story doesn't need to end with the pessimistic transition to the next manufactured distraction next week.

There is so much left for us to do.