To Ask the Hard Question is Simple
by: David Yee

“What would it take to transform our society for the betterment of all?”

I had a hard time answering this, which is odd because it’s sort of my question. At least, it’s the phrasing that I suggested to Ross when he floated this initial idea. It’s hardly mine, either in spirit or in terms of intellectual property. Still, there’s enough perceived ownership to prove my difficulty ironic.

Sometimes when I can’t answer big questions, I google them. I do this a lot when writing plays. For example, once when I was stuck on a character’s motivation in a specific scene, I googled “how does she get what she wants??” It’s more of a way to vent my frustration than an avenue of research I expect to return useful results. Though I’d be remiss not to mention that my search above brought me – right off the top – to the Wikipedia entry for the 2002 film Slap Her, She’s French* starring Piper Perabo. The movie currently has a score of 36% on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, and (as I learned) was secretly re-written by acclaimed playwright and screenwriter Alan Ball. Which means that, I shit you not, after Alan Ball won the Oscar for Best Screenplay with American Beauty in 2001 … the very next thing he did was an un-credited rewrite of Slap Her, She’s French. Which is only slightly more difficult to swallow than the fact that Piper Perabo used to headline movies.

My inability to answer the question as posed by… me… drove me to google it, in its entirety. “What would it take to transform our society for the betterment of all?” Apart from the expected Quora and WikiHow pages, the first reasonable result came from a site called Top Yaps, which boasts itself as being “India’s 1st Social Media News Platform” … and, judging by their AOL-era web design, that’s not hyperbole. It’s a clickbait-y little think piece by someone called Farida Rizwan from 2016, titled “Top Ten Ways to Contribute to Society”**. It starts broad: #10. Improve Yourself, then gets oddly specific: #6. Donate Blood, finally flaring back out with: #1. Be a Good Samaritan. Overall, totally harmless.

Feeling underwhelmed, I knocked back to the search results and clicked another, which caught my attention as it was from a local Fox News affiliate in Delmarva. For those of you who don’t know, the Delmarva Peninsula is on the East Coast, mostly made up of Delaware, with bits of Maryland and Virginia; which is why it’s called “Delmarva”… because Americans are bad at naming things. So, WBOC in Delmarva has an article titled “10 Ways How To Contribute For Betterment Of Society”*** [sic] and it is a mess. Like it was written in Russian and then translated to English over Google. It also includes, with very little context, links to: Doteasy Web Hosting, a listicle extolling the virtues of hybrid cars, and – my personal favourite – the Masters in Social Work program at Virginia Commonwealth University. Unreadable as the whole thing was, a few things caught my eye. Most noticeably, the suggestion to donate blood. In fact, of the ‘10 Ways How To Contribute For Betterment Of Society’, five are exact matches to Ms Rizwan’s article. Gems like “Plant Trees” and “Drive Carefully” are direct lifts (and classic Rizwan, amiright?), along with several passages in the preface. Though slightly ESL-ified to some unknown end, it was definitely a copy of her work, but also definitely not her. The WBOC article had been posted in February 2020, and they identified it as ‘Sponsored Content’. Meaning someone profited off a plagiarized post by a woman who – I think – genuinely wanted to share her thoughts on how to make the world a better place.

So. What would it take to transform society for the betterment of all?

Burn the fucking internet.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slap_Her..._She%27s_French 

** https://topyaps.com/top-10-ways-to-contribute-to-society/ 

*** http://www.wboc.com/story/41649663/10-ways-how-to-contribute-for-betterment-of-society