What The Frock

Somewhere along the way, the internet stopped being a place where people shared things and became a place where everyone demanded that everything being shared somehow apply to them.

Welcome to Bean Soup Theory.

The idea comes from a wonderfully simple episode of internet absurdity. Someone posted a recipe for bean soup. Rather than simply deciding whether they wanted to make it, people began responding with ways the recipe needed to be changed to suit them. They didn’t like a particular ingredient. They couldn’t eat something in it. Could the creator change the recipe and repost it for their particular needs?

At some point the obvious question gets lost: If you don’t like bean soup, why are you making bean soup?

Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod use that question to wander through three very different stories in this week’s What The Frock? The common thread is what Dave calls the internet’s increasingly pervasive “what about me?” syndrome, where people take someone else’s story and change its parameters until they themselves become the focus.

The first example is considerably more serious than soup. A week ago, Jason Arday was still at Cambridge University, surrounded by questions about his academic record and allegations of plagiarism. Within days he had resigned, and shortly afterward he was dead. What followed online became almost immediately a fight over who was responsible and what his death supposedly proved. Instead of resolving questions about academic standards, institutional responsibility, or Arday himself, people began stirring their own ingredients into the story.

Then there is the USS Abraham Lincoln, whose extended deployment has generated stories about everything from food to mold in the showers. Dave spent a decade in the Navy, much of it aboard submarines, and has some thoughts about sailors complaining about food, cleaning spaces, inspections, and the eternal ability of Navy chiefs to find something that needs fixing. He also remembers an era when a sailor at sea could not instantly transmit every complaint home, where it could become somebody else’s social-media crusade.

And finally, Australia gives us the perfect dessert.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese went onto a podcast where the host asked him to play “Shag, Marry, Date.” He initially declined. She persisted. Eventually Kylie Minogue entered the equation, and Albanese gave the answer that launched a thousand outraged posts: Kylie for all three.

Naturally, the internet lost its mind.

Which brings us back to the soup.

Maybe every story doesn’t require our personal outrage. Maybe every event doesn’t validate our politics. Maybe somebody else’s experience doesn’t need to be reconstructed around our preferences. Sometimes the healthiest response to something on the internet is to recognize that it wasn’t made for us and keep scrolling.

Because once everybody starts stirring the pot, eventually we’re all eating the same bean soup.

And as Dave warns at the end of the episode, it might taste good going down, but sooner or later it’s going to give you heartburn.