Picture a huge, poisonous fruit falling to the ground, its skin splitting open, the rancid pulp pouring out. Picture the ants discovering the mess, swarming over it, drunk on the abundance in front of them — and far too preoccupied with their feasting to ever look up at the tree it fell from.

It’s an apt metaphor for what happens during one of the public meltdowns that double as free entertainment for the extremely online. The splatter of drama, the rush to consume, the way we pick over every last sordid detail of the controversy until there’s no meat left. What we miss is that the details hardly matter, as individually fascinating as they may be; indeed, a large part of this problem is that we only ever talk about it in terms of its most recent iteration. We obsess over the individual characters — the Bean Dad, the Racist Cheerleader, the Guy Who Didn’t Cum On His Cat (the internet remains unpersuaded) — yet fail to grasp that they’re all starring in the same self-perpetuating tragedy.