Just out of college, I worked a part-time job as I tried to pull a life together in Los Angeles. The only benefit was that I got to work with people my own age. One of them was a black girl I’ll call Jasmine. Jasmine was a real people-person—very outgoing, charismatic. She also wasn’t that bright, and once she realized that I kept up with the news, would ask me to explain current events to her. What did I think of Trump? What did I think about Black Lives Matter? She was the kind of person that doesn’t have a mental filter when she speaks, but also doesn’t really need one. Kind and curious is how I remember her.

Which is why I believed her when, during one of our discussions about Black Lives Matter (pre-Floyd), she casually said “I didn’t know about all the racism stuff until I went to college”. This offhand remark has stayed with me for years. How could a black girl from Oakland not know about “all the racism” until she was formally taught it?

Released in 2013, the film 12 Years A Slave won the Oscar for Best Picture. The adulation of the academy was easily anticipated: any time a filmmaker finds a new way to tell a slavery or holocaust story, you’ll get some trophies to take home. And this one delivered. A stacked cast of established and new actors, good direction and excellent cinematography. And most importantly, its innovative narrative structure.

Previous stories of bondage would begin in a state of slavery, and end with a bid for freedom. This format has long been criticized by academia for creating the impression that the problem with slavery is that you simply have to man up enough to escape it. What 12 Years does is tell the story of a free black man who is kidnapped into slavery, then show how miraculous his extrication is and have him return to his family at last: sobbing, broken, his life was stolen by systemic evil. Its immense success clearly signaled that America was still in the grips of racism, that hard conversations would have to be had about our history. About how far we haven’t come.

But, if we’re to believe the Jasmines of the world, then what was the film really portraying? If racism must be taught, then is that actually what the film is about? Deeply affecting films are so because their form corresponds to our real lives, not because of their surface level plot

(entertaining as they can be), and certainly not because of “representation”. And 12 Years A Slave was an affecting film. So why was it a success? What was really being shown that connects with our lives?

If one drills into the form of the drama, you find that the way slavery is treated in the film is wholly unique: there is nothing outside of it. Early in the film, when Solomon is on his first plantation, Paul Dano (as a caricature of a weak-chinned southern racist) sings a slave catching song. The film cuts into a montage of life on the plantation, even Sunday preaching, while Dano’s shrieking intonations hang over all. The meaning is immediately clear: not even the natural beauty of the bucolic plantation is outside the umbrella of slavery, of systemic racism. Everything is tainted. And indeed, for the entire film there are no transcendent moments of natural beauty or human kindness, no good that a white person can do at all. The real catharsis of the film is when Solomon joins in a slave spiritual, finally accepting that he is not separate from the other slaves—just because he was born “free” he is just as much a slave as they are.

What does this journey, this catharsis in particular, mirror in 2013?

Two years later, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates would win the National Book Award and a MacArthur Genius Grant with his slender volume Between the World and Me. An open letter to his son, he recounts his childhood in Baltimore and outlines his deeply held convictions that racism is not just alive in America, but is foundational to it. The world is Black and white and the injustice is constant and perpetual.

While these subjects have marked nearly all of Coates’s writing career, this totalizing worldview was not always present. In 2004, he wrote an article for The Village Voice called Black for Blue where he recounts his wife’s robbery at gunpoint. To his surprise, the NYPD were extremely responsive, and continued to offer updates and support over the next few months. He records his about-face as someone who has always culturally loathed the cops: “Maybe the cops actually care about us. More likely, they just want to get the guy. Fine by me.”

Reading this piece, one would think it is an example of a young radical learning his political convictions don’t quite align with reality. Maybe a small shift into maturity. A good thing, these moments that confound us.

And yet, eleven years later, he was painting a picture of America as foundationally white supremacist. I still remember reading Oliver Traldi’s review of Coates’s essay collection We Were Eight Years in Power where he cut to the heart of the issue: “Because history still lives in us, for Coates, like a demon, like a possessing spirit, like a drug. He walks around American cities on history the way Infinite Jest characters walk around them on heroin.” Again I ask, what changed? Did the country become more racist in the intervening years? Coates admits in his book that there is only a single occasion he feels he suffered a direct racist interaction, and even has to cushion it by saying that his reaction was “hot with all of the moment and all of my history.” What gives?

As I look back, it’s clear to me why 12 Years was so popular: it’s an accurate depiction of the black experience on social media. Going from a state of relative bliss, living life, to being thrust into constant, totalizing “proof” that racism is all around you. The catharsis comes joining in the great struggle as Black, instead of thinking yourself an individual.

With distance it is clear Ta-Nehisi Coates is not unique. Oliver Stone, Noam Chomsky—they did precisely what he does now: a strange dance where they are relentless, relentless critics of America, but also place it at a godlike height, where nothing else is of any moral concern. Self appointed super-egos of the self flagellating superpower. I can’t do anything right, says the valedictorian. This is the heart of social media for the past twelve years: a great, anti-human, algorithmically driven flattening of individuals into our irreducible parts: race, generation, sex- a self perpetuating medium fed by the strife surrounding those categories.

It’s why film, novels, all the arts have fallen away: We spent 12 years thinking like Coates does. Film’s great strength is allowing us to be the perfect voyeur of an individual, to hear what they say and see what they do and realize that those two things often don’t match. For 12 years this wasn’t of interest. Immutable categories (race, generation, class, sex) and systems (monarchy, stock trading, global intifada) were.

Twelve years. Twelve long years we’ve been slaves to algorithmic thinking. And if I have learned anything in the past 12 years, the only way out of this slavery is a bid for freedom. I can’t speak to politics or the economy, but I can speak for film when I say that there is more money and talent being left on the table than ever before. That audiences are starved for films that connect to their lives through form, experiences instead of political statements on experiences. As for Coates, perhaps in our new freedom we can see that what was between him and the world wasn’t systemic oppression, but like the rest of us, his phone.