The Algorithm Ate Our Compassion

On dopamine, contempt, and the slow death of neighborliness

Photo by Daniel Gomez: https://www.pexels.com/photo/vintage-cemetery-statue-with-cross-in-black-and-white-35582640/

To those making jokes about Renée,

“Glad she’s dead, hope more of you get shot, continue to impotently seethe.”

“Roses are red violets are blue now her smug face matches those colors and hue.”

These are things people wrote this week about Renée Nicole Macklin Good, a woman most of us had never heard of ten days ago. I have one post that’s racked up hundreds of comments like this, and worse.

I’m writing to the people who typed them. But I’m also writing to the rest of us who watched those comments scroll by, felt our stomachs drop, and then just kept scrolling because it’s easier to survive the day when we pretend we didn’t see what we saw.

I’ve been sitting with your words, trying to understand. And before I ask you anything, I need to confess something.

When I read what you wrote, I didn’t feel compassion. I felt contempt. I wanted to reduce you to your worst sentence, to make you into proof that your side has lost its soul. Part of me wanted to dismiss you as monsters, because monsters are easier to disregard than neighbors. I guess, part of me still does.

But I’ve been down that road. I know where it ends. It ends with me becoming the mirror image of what I’m trying to resist.

So I’m not writing to lecture you. I’m writing because I genuinely do not understand.

What happens inside a person when they write something like that?

I’m not being rhetorical. I really want to know. When you typed those words about a woman you’d never met, a woman whose body wasn’t even in the ground yet, what did you feel? Satisfaction? Righteousness? A quick hit of dopamine when you hit “post”? Nothing at all?

Because here’s what I can’t get out of my head.

Her six-year-old had just been in that car, maybe playing with those stuffed animals that were spilling out of her glove compartment.

Her wife watched her get shot on a snowy street in Minneapolis, and then be refused medical attention by the very people who shot her.

So I’m asking, genuinely, whether that tiny dose of reality ever entered your mind. Or maybe it didn’t feel real to you because it was just a name on a screen attached to a story you already figured you understood?

So let me ask it another way:

If your pastor read your comment out loud in church this Sunday, would you be proud of it?

If your grandmother saw what you wrote, would you stand by it?

If your kids found it someday, would you be able to explain why you thought it was okay to make jokes about a woman’s murder?

And maybe the hardest question of all: was there a version of you, not that long ago, maybe, who would’ve been horrified by what you just wrote?

Let me tell you about the woman you’re joking about.

Renée was a poet and a mother of three. She was a Christian.

And I’ve noticed something else: some of you are now sharing fake criminal records and invented stories about child abuse, anything to make her death feel deserved. Those claims have been debunked by multiple fact-checkers. The “rap sheet” circulating online is for a different person with a different birthdate. Her ex-husband called her “a devoted Christian.” Her former mother-in-law said her death was “deeply wrong.”

But here’s what strikes me: even if those lies were true, would that make joking about her death acceptable? Would it make celebrating her death the sort of thing Jesus might encourage?

Her wife, Becca, said Renée believed “we are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole.”

That’s what she was doing that morning. Her neighbors had been terrorized by ICE for weeks. Renée and Becca stopped to support them. “We had whistles,” Becca said. “They had guns.”

She didn’t die because she was “woke.” She died because she believed what she learned in church: that we’re supposed to show up for the defenseless, stand between them and those who want to hurt them ... even if it costs us everything.

Of course, none of that requires you to agree with her politics. It doesn’t mean you have to affirm her marriage or approve of her activism. You can disagree with her. You can critique her. You can argue with her ideas all day long.

But, I mean, to make jokes about her death? To celebrate it and act like it’s entertainment?

That’s different, isn’t it? I mean, that’s not politics; it’s dehumanization practice.

And if we’re being honest, it isn’t new training. This is an old American habit dressed in more contemporary attire.

Black families have watched this country shrug at their dead for generations. Black people have endured callous state violence, and then endured the second violence of being told it wasn’t really violence, that it was justified, that the victim had it coming, that the only tragedy was the inconvenience to public order. Names like Keith Porter rarely receive the national grief, coverage, or outrage we can summon when a story happens to fit the preferences of the algorithm or the fears of the loudest.

So no, I’m not particularly interested in a culture war trivia contest over which victims “count.” I’m more interested in whether we’re going to keep practicing a kind of moral numbness perfected by watching all this play out on the most vulnerable, and is now being applied even more broadly.

A few months back, when a public figure was killed, and people on the other side mocked it, a bunch of you insisted that celebrating anyone’s death is wrong. You said we should pray for the family. You said making murder into a punchline was depraved.

I agreed with that principle then. I agree with it now.

So help me understand what changed.

Didn’t there used to be a Sunday School class or something where somebody taught you that every person on earth is made in the image of God?

Maybe there was a youth group leader who told you that Jesus loves everybody, not just those who look like us, vote like us, or love like us?

Maybe there was a grandmother who would’ve talked about washing your mouth out if she heard you talk about another human being the way you talked about Renée?

I don’t know, maybe there was a time when you believed loving your enemies actually meant something. When you would’ve been disgusted by the idea of mocking a person’s death before their children had even buried them … regardless of what you thought of them.

I don’t know what from back then to now. I don’t know when the Christ who wept at Lazarus’s tomb got traded in for a “Christ” who cheers over the graves of strangers. I don’t know when “pro-life” started coming with an asterisk.

But I wonder if that earlier version of you is still in there somewhere. The one who hadn’t yet learned to sort human beings into categories of who deserves compassion and who deserves contempt.

And for the rest of us who didn’t type the comments but watched them happen, I’m asking something too.

What are we becoming when we treat this as normal? When we let this register as “just the internet,” as if the internet isn’t where we practice cultivating our souls now?

Here’s what I believe. If we’re going to survive this moment without tearing each other to pieces, we’re going to have to recover the human being we used to be, or become the human being we might have been if the algorithm and the anger and the amnesia hadn’t gotten to us first.

I don’t know if you’re capable of that. If you just want to know the truth, some days I don’t know if I am either.

But I have to believe that somehow it’s possible. For you. For me. For all of us.

Because the alternative is a world where we keep making jokes about each other’s dead and calling it a “win.”

I love my kids just as much as you love yours. Consequently, I’m trying to refuse that world so our kids can live together in peace in a better one.

But they’re watching, so we need to start showing them how.