The Ice Water Is Everywhere and I Still Haven't Done Mine

My Facebook feed has basically turned into a channel of people screaming and dumping buckets of ice water on their own heads. I counted last night, half seriously, and it was something like six of the last twenty posts in my feed. Not photos of people's kids, not somebody's dumb Farmville update from 2011 come back to haunt me, just wet, shrieking friends and, increasingly, wet shrieking famous people.

Bill Gates did his last week with this elaborate rig some engineer built for him, a whole little machine that dumps the bucket so he doesn't even have to hold it, which is such a Bill Gates way to do the challenge that I laughed out loud at my desk. And then earlier this week Zuckerberg posted his too, standing in what I assume is his backyard, getting drenched, calling out Bill Gates again along with Sheryl Sandberg and a couple other people to go next. It's turned into this weird recursive thing where the same six or seven tech and business names keep nominating each other back and forth like theyre the only people who exist.

I'm not being nominated yet, thank god, but I know it's coming. A friend of mine already told me she's "saving me for later," which is somehow worse than just being called out directly, because now I get to sit here for however many more days dreading it.

Here's my actual complaint though, and it's a boring one: the autoplay video. If you're on a phone plan that isn't unlimited, every one of these videos that starts playing itself the second it scrolls into view is eating your data whether you asked for it or not. I'm on an older Android phone with a data cap that I regularly blow through by the 20th of the month, and this week alone I feel like a meaningful chunk of it has gone to watching people I barely know from high school gasp when cold water hits their spine. Facebook rolled out autoplay video in the feed back in the spring and it felt like a minor annoyance then. Now, with basically every third post being a 15-second ice bucket clip, it's a genuine drain, and there's no obvious toggle buried in settings that I've found to just turn the behavior off entirely rather than muting sound.

The bigger conversation happening around this, the one I actually care about more than my data plan, is whether any of it means anything. There's a whole strain of commentary going around calling this "slacktivism," the idea that dumping ice on your head and tagging three friends lets you feel like you did something for ALS research without writing a check or learning anything about the disease. I get the instinct to be cynical about it. I was cynical about it too, for about four days.

But the ALS Association's own numbers are the thing that's actually changed my mind, at least partway. Donations to the organization have reportedly jumped by some enormous multiple of what they'd normally see in this stretch of August, and it keeps climbing every time somebody posts an update. That's real money going to a disease that most people, myself included if I'm honest, could not have told you much about a month ago. I didn't know what ALS actually does to a person's body until this week, until I looked it up because I felt like an idiot not knowing what I was supposedly raising awareness for by watching other people get wet.

So yeah, it's goofy. It's also, weirdly, working, in a way that a lot of "raise awareness" campaigns online very much do not. Most viral challenges evaporate into nothing, some hashtag that trends for six hours and accomplishes exactly zero. This one has an actual bucket, an actual sensation (cold, brief, mildly miserable), and an actual dollar amount attached to it that a news organization can point to. That combination seems to be doing something the usual share-this-status stuff never manages.

I still think the autoplay video thing is a legitimate annoyance and somebody at Facebook should let me turn it off without muting every video in existence. And I still haven't picked out where I'm going to fill a bucket when my nomination finally lands, because our kitchen sink is approximately eight feet from anywhere I'd actually want to stand while getting drenched. But ask me again in a week. I'll probably have done it by then, complained about it the whole time, and posted the video anyway.