Orhe’s a jolly good fellow!
Last week, TikTok user Cyril @cyrilschr posted several videos which detailed his experiences after filling his bathtub full of Orbeez®. For those of you who don’t know, Orbeez® are little colourful beads that are meant to grow 100 times in size when submerged in water. The videos get increasingly more and more difficult to believe. They begin with the tub overflowing with the beads, which then proceed to fill the toilet and sink, supposedly coming from the bathtub through the pipes. Later on, we learn that the beads seem to have invaded the plumbing system of the entire town, as they are seen in nearby rivers and brought to the attention of other residents, and even the mayor. Please take some time to familiarize yourself with the story before continuing. It’s not worth me re-doing the great work that low-budget Buzzfeed wannabees have already done.
Orbeez® guy’s videos were quick to receive criticism from plumbers who kept saying none of this was even possible. C’mon plumbers! Let us have some fun! Why do you have to ruin everything!
I love the Orbeez® guy. I truly cannot explain why I love the Orbeez® guy. Thirteen years of French Immersion was worth it so that I could understand what the Orbeez® guy is saying. Ya, he’s in France or something. Imagine Les Mis but the sewers are filled with Orbeez®. Mwah. *chef’s kiss*.
Around a week later, Orbeez® guy posted a video coming out as a fake. He said the bathtub was really filled with beads, but the rest was fabricated. Orbeez® guy just wanted us to have a laugh. The mayor didn’t really get mad at him. Or at least I don’t think he did. I’m not actually that good at French. And while we as a society seemed consumed by the Orbeez® guy so passionately, no one cared a week later. They only cared about the joy they felt upon realization, and I think that is truly beautiful.
Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk® in his book Neither Sun nor Death explains his intellectual itinerary as such:
“We live constantly in collective fields of excitation; this cannot be changed so long as we are social beings. The input of stress inevitably enters me; thoughts are not free, each of us can divine them. They come from the newspaper and wind up returning to the newspaper. My sovereignty, if it exists, can only appear by my letting the integrated impulsion die in me or, should this fail, by my retransmitting it in a totally metamorphosed, verified, filtered, or recoded form. It serves nothing to contest it: I am free only to the extent that I interrupt escalations and that I am able to immunize myself against infections of opinion.”
Radical interruption, as theorized by Sloterdijk®, is a form of direct action which involves interrupting the social flow of information. Not only did Orbeez® guy literally interrupt the flow of plumbing in his town, he interrupted the stream of news over the entire week. My feed was filled with Orbeez® guy jokes, theories, and even one-off fanfictions (okay, mayhaps the
fanfictions I found myself after some thorough searching. Mayhaps). I had to sit down and think about what I really needed for survival. What would my life be like without indoor plumbing, or without access to Orbeez®-free water?
I don’t care if he didn’t actually flood his whole city with Orbeez®. What matters is that we believed he did, which in turn made us consider what that reality would be like. For a moment, our society stopped, and paused, and felt real empathy for Orbeez® guy. We walked a mile in his shoes, we sat for a minute in his Orbeez®-filled bath. We wondered what we would have done if we were in his situation. Me? I would have swiftly eaten all the Orbeez®. They’re fully digestible. All Orbeez® are non-toxic and tests have shown that if a child swallows Orbeez® they should pass through the digestive system with no problems. Orbeez® do not break down in the digestive tract, do not stick together, and are not absorbed into the body.