The Cure for Candid Camera Urchins

The crashout caught on camera. Is there anything more primal, more visceral, more provocative, more red tooth and claw, bound within a square frame?

The juxtaposition of a man’s most pathetic (in the original Greek sense) outburst, with moistened eyes, muscles clenched, arms in a fury, teeth crashing, seized in digitized pigments, reproduced a million times over on the pupilsuck assembly line known as the “scroll,” fascinates. Like the Yank in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Hairy Ape,” the feral display is served for our voyeuristic pleasure. Every “like” tapped is a tossed cut of raw meat to induce reaction.

The candid tape was once an innocent lark. It required tact and subterfuge. An unassuming, plainly dressed advance man peeping out from behind a support beam, brandishing a camcorder disguised as a pencil case. The prank itself pure as the driven snow. Staged bank queue delays; faulty cutlery sales pitches; hollowed-out bowling pins. The kind of mundane eccentricities to earn a chuckle from ol’ Miss Mable as she tries to fill a styrofoam bowl with ice cream, only for the rivulet of soft-serve vanilla to flow uncontrollably to the ground. These “deary me” didos were simple in humor, not designed to provoke red-rage tempers.

Even into the 1990s, with rising ironic detachment paired with improved furtive technology, the art of clandestine cut-ups kept its lightheartedness. A man with an oversized Nokia phone screaming HELLOOOOOOO!! in a hushed library or issuing contradicting orders to a drive-through wagie. Nothing overly transgressive, with the figure of fun happily signing a release form afterward.

Thanks to Steve Jobs, everyone’s pocket is packed with a supercomputer, the Library of Alexandria, and a state-of-the-art camera that dwarves the Hubble telescope in zoom power. How would humanity wield such a mighty device? Liberals sincerely believed, as Nathan Pinkoski put it, that unmediated internet access would “reinforce individual liberty, democratic government, and a free and open society.” A few hundred porn sites, thousands of I.S.I.S. beheading videos, and a bajillion cat memes later, and whatever shining dispensation the internet was supposed to usher in was, in a word, overstated.

The same cyberalchemy compressed into a dark, reflective square had a similarly ignominious fate. Rather than be used to transcend language barriers to order a traditional plate of dolmadakia, youthful malcontents are brandishing the pinnacle of human knowhow to monetize duplicity. They’re plying high-powered scopes, not to track Orion’s arm, but for their own candid-camera genre: clout streaming.

To the kids’ credit, the sundry methods of catching attention on the feed have a spark of inventiveness. Sure, Chinese transfer students whip the natives in STEM testing, but you’ll never see an American teen outclassed in humiliating his neighbor for ‘net cred. Screaming like stab victims in Home Depot; chucking bread loaves into the trolleys of unsuspecting shoppers; taunting the ragged-clothed homeless; woofing loudly and shoving a plush dog into unsuspecting strollers; outright insulting random people on the street—live-farming “engagement” is as diverse as it’s lucrative.

But all hams have a limit. One unsuspecting frozen pizza delivery driver, in the middle of a 12-hour shift, wasn’t in a jocular mood when a bucktoothed scalawag played a cod on him. The pimpled imp attempted the “Apple Pay” gag, wherein the funster asks for the time, the target pulls out his iPhone to check, before the mischief-plotter extends his own iPhone and plays the telltale ding!, pretending like he filched some dough from the dope’s digital wallet.

Most tech-familiar marks might laugh it off. But not this stockman. What Philip Roth called the “indigenous American berserk” took hold, his chipperness morphing into desperate aggression. “I don’t have time for this. My life is hard enough as it is!” the modern Willy Loman thundered. “You’re probably making money off this. I can’t pay my mortgage, and I got four kids at home.”

The dignity of the an-hour-worker can only take so much ridicule, so much humiliation, so much irreverence. The japester revealed the joke to no avail, mostly because his vocabulary has been whisked and mushed by TikTokking for 22 hours a day. Since the internet swarms anything resembling real human emotion, the tense exchange rocketed into virality. The sorry pizza slinger was quickly identified, a GoFundMe was launched, and enough nobodies chipped in enough change to pay off his house, send all his children to community college, and gift a gently used Kawasaki SX-R 160 jet ski to take out weekends on Lake Michigan.

All’s well that ends well, right? Not all middle-aged moilers are so lucky when some snot comes around pushing an iPhone 18 his parents bought him in your face. Plus, a generation of doomscroll zombies pimping out their permanent records for the lolz isn’t healthy for the future of a self-governing republic.

But what to do, short of tossing these ne’er-do-wells in the clink, where they’ll learn the fine vocational art of smuggling dope up their anal cavity? There must exist a solution outside of the usual Boomer medicine of: “Put all these ingrates in prison. Oh, and don’t ever let them come even within a country mile of affording a down payment on the home I purchased back in ‘83 for a summer’s salary at The Burger Palace.”

Since this is a libertarian publication, I’ll propose a little-used and little-appreciated libertarian policy solution. No, not legalizing amphibian venom hash. This is an old justice, one born of this country’s restless westward expansion, when badges and gavels were not on speed dial. This is the judgment of the posse. Have Walmart, Target, Kohl’s, Kroger, JCPenney, CVS, and other retailers post notice for volunteer sentries who will man the aisles, ready to heave-ho any troublemaker trying to boost his Instagram following. Nothing lethal; nothing bloody, besides a scrape or two, a bruise at worst; nothing mangled; nothing too ghastly to send an old crone to the floor in a faint. Just efficient, strong-armed removal.

Let your imagination form the following: four burly men clutching a wiry punk and dropping his temerarious behind in the parking lot, then barking a few rough words of warning. Some chuckles and high-fives. A sheepish retreat. Maybe a mommy called.

The benefits are numerous. Shoppers would finally be left in peace, unconcerned about a scamp plopping a box of x-small Trojans in their basket of insta-rice and canned green beans. Store managers would broom the riffraff out at little to no cost. Layabout men would be able to get out some latent testosterone while also contributing to their community. Guardian scapegoating would find a productive outlet.

We don’t have to bowl alone any longer. Communal bonds can be repaired if we let men reassume their natural role as protectors. If you think American males aren’t itching to get off the couch to publicly uphold Apollonian virtues like discipline and fortitude, remember one of the most increasingly popular subgenres of candid video: “HEY! THIS MAN IS HERE TO MEET A 13-YEAR-OLD BOY!!”