The defining art form of our times might be the reaction video. You’ve surely seen a few: Some influencer gasping, or screaming, or doing bug eyes as they take in a much-hyped new song or a movie’s big twist. The point is to bottle unpredictable, sizzling human emotion into rewatchable content. Scrolling on one’s phone can be a deadening experience, but here’s someone feeling, or at least pretending to feel, a genuine feeling—even if the abundance of these videos surely numbs us further.

Last week, a video of Hasan Piker reacting to the sight of Charlie Kirk getting shot during a discussion at Utah Valley University on Wednesday quickly accumulated millions of views. It was unwittingly made: Piker, a leftist commentator and video-game influencer, was broadcasting live on the streaming platform Twitch on Wednesday, browsing around the internet in an attempt to nail down the truth of what had happened. In an automatic-thinking patter, he said, “There’s a closer footage of Charlie Kirk getting shot in the neck here as well where you can clear—” and here he recoiled as the video played out of sight from the audience—“Ohhhh, he’s dead. Oh my God he’s definitely dead. Oh my God. I can’t believe I just saw that” …

Yet he was processing, in real time, a gory murder that held personal implications. Kirk was his peer in an ascendant content-creator class now under mortal threat from the very culture it helped shape.