Consider the moments that actually defined 2024: the total eclipse, the brat summer, the images from the campaign trail. What united them was that they were not simply experienced, they were performed, captured, posted and amplified, and the experience of watching millions of other people experience them became part of the experience itself.
This is the strange loop of the viral age. A moment becomes important because it is seen, and it is seen because it has been made to look like a moment. The event and its image now happen simultaneously, and the people inside them are often acting, consciously or not, for the cameras that are everywhere at once.
It is easy to sneer at this, to lament the death of unmediated experience. But the viral moment is also the way a large and divided public now comes together, the closest thing a fragmented society has to a shared calendar. The task is not to escape it, which is impossible, but to learn to tell the difference between a moment made significant by its own image and one that matters for what is actually happening.