While certainly, in the technological world of today (the singularity and all that rot), there are numerous ways in which to notify the public at large about a shooter that has taken siege upon your corporate building, one of those ways doesn’t feel like it should be Twitter. And written in a calm, almost eerily cipher-like manner at that. Though product manager Vadim Lavrusik’s stoic play-by-play, “Active shooter at YouTube HQ. Heard shots and saw people running while at my desk. Now barricaded inside a room with coworkers” (which definitely sounds like hell on earth), has been removed after the discovery that the account was hacked, it was nonetheless believed. And that it was believed is what makes it just as disconcerting. That Nasim Najafi Aghdam, the rare female gun rampager that showed up to YouTube on Tuesday was not an employee, is, in all honesty, probably why she was able to convey such, let’s call it, passion. Because most people working in corporate America have long ago had their “emotion sensor” deactivated, tripped only vaguely at the threat of death, apparently.
Her long-standing issues with YouTube’s policies in terms of the “adpocalypse” a.k.a. certain YouTube channels not having as fair of a chance to incur revenue–specifically those that Aghdam preferred to post (content pertaining to animal cruelty and the dangers of anal sex, etc.)–drove her to take the drastic action that led to her wounding three people in the company’s employ, followed by the predictable act of killing herself. And, to a certain extent, Aghdam’s extreme dissatisfaction trickles down to a more troubling phenomenon in American culture: that people want to make money from posting videos and/or become famous from them. With a click as easy as 1-2-3, you, too, can do essentially nothing but be yourself. It’s almost as simple as sitting at your desk and tweeting about a life-threatening crisis. At the same time, can a person be blamed for wanting to “generate revenue” this easily (the days of “hard work” as envisioned by manual labor are long gone) when an office job is so soul-sucking that it would genuinely cause people to think that you could detachedly tweet as though you were writing a captain’s log about imminent death all around you?