It starts on SewageTok, because of course there’s a SewageTok, do you really need to ask. In green-screened front-camera narration over screenshots of a screenshot, an innocent-enough nerd tells us a fun fact. Apparently New York’s sewers are its storm drains and its storm drains its sewers and so they dump sewage into the harbor whenever it rains hard. “Tens of billions of gallons a year, a literal shit ton!” the narrator concludes, enunciating, no vowels schwas, with a slight guffaw as if to save us from missing the joke.

It does OK for a video about sewage. 300k views, comments decrying capitalism, all surprisingly earnest until it breaks containment, at which point someone says “we should all flush at once to see what happens”.

This does not go unnoticed. See, everyone wants to do it (though who would admit it). It catches fire, I think, because it’s arguably the perfect crime. Without courage or money or time, with plausible deniability and zero physical risk, comes an inescapable fuck-you to all who deserved it, a system, a city, a society seen as complicit. Is what we liked to imagine, you have to understand. Millions of millennial and Gen Z New Yorkers could never quite convey the way the world had seemed to turn to shit. But this, this requires no degree in semiotics. It proves to be a sort of universal solvent. These climate accounts pick it up, link it to horseshoe crabs or something. And did you know that Consolidated Pipe & Supply Co. made millions in profit last year? I don’t really know how the unions get involved given how quickly they deem “the action” “praxis” and start fighting over nomenclature. (The “septic strike”? Is “shit-in” too glib?) To their horror Abundance bros join in. All this to say there’s causes now, respectable ones, we’re just waiting for the cultural wet market to work its magic. Then someone posts this AI-generated VHS-filter phonk edit with a countdown timer, very corny but by the time I see it Ice Spice’s story lends it credibility:

8 A.M.
October 12th
FLUSH
Show Them Overflow

Which instantly precipitates this big crystal of discontent, this mental gout. Palestine accounts play dumb, then embrace the implications of an October “flood”. #flushforpalestine. From the river to the sea. From the sewer to the Hudson to the harbor to the Atlantic. It’s aesthetic. The “they”? Unclear. Wrong question, really. Flood is protest, overflow metaphor, this massive pointless action proof of power. It’s, like, a Bataille thing, says my least tolerable roommate, who does plan to do it, bought an Olipop for the occasion, my first sign participation numbers would get real, as they did. The Ice Bucket Challenge failed because curing ALS is hard and who owns a bucket? But Operation Skibidi—I am partial to this name coined as it was in our comments—Operation Skibidi needs you to wake up and take a shit. Frictionless, given enough fiber.

So comes morning on the 12th. It’s raining, not quite Grey’s-Anatomy-establishing-shot out there but still. But then comes eight o’clock. CDC, DEP, EPA, NSA—take your pick—estimate seven or eight or nine hundred thousand New Yorkers do it, clock app in one hand, chrome handle in the other, with GPS-synchronized precision that’d make a Cold War general blush. In thirty seconds millions of gallons hit nineteenth-century sewers already “running hot” (as they put it on SewageTok). Treatment plants hit capacity. Sewage backs up into basements throughout southeast Brooklyn and Queens. Manholes pop in the Bronx. An automated system “is left with no choice but to send tens of millions of gallons of effluent into the rivers and harbor.”

By six p.m. the damage is done. Thousands of homes flooded, beaches closed for a week. Harbor stinks for a month. Like a hundred million in damage and losses. Insurance quite literally ain’t covering shit. I should be able to ignore this, you probably thought, I don’t live in a basement, I can buy one of those Glade things, wait it out, meanwhile the city better bring emergency crews and vacuum trucks, they better have the goddam Seal Team Six of plumbers. And they do! You are somewhere in their three-year backlog.

We did it, Reddit. Gleeful euphemisms appear as spontaneously as their referent. It’s an, ah, infrastructure audit. Business as usual, officer. There’s copycats in Philly, Detroit, Boston. City, state, and federal governments kind of lose their… minds. The National Guard is deployed, for some reason, and have little to do but shovel shit in camo. Some committee holds a hearing in which someone asks about, quote, “technical solutions” and the FEMA guy demurs but Smart Pipe stock still pops. The most important question, asked twenty different ways: what law was broken? Someone coughs and it sounds a bit like “Brandenburg v. Ohio”. Can the state ban protest marches for wear and tear done to the street? Can the state stop you from flushing your toilet? Does it really want to when (and here you should imagine I’ve raised my eyebrows archly as I read off a TikTok I’ve paused with my thumb) no movement seeking regime change with >3.5% participation has failed?

Waters are muddied. The city says but for the literal perfect storm—and the news vans parked outside the treatment plants—most New Yorkers might not have known it happened. It was the rain, they say, we were a drop in the bucket, but please never, ever do that again. Eric Adams learns the phrase fait accompli. It is hilarious to hear it leave his mouth. It always sounds overdubbed. Meanwhile, ads appear on buses: ZOHRAN WON’T PISS ON YOUR LEG AND TELL YOU IT’S RAINING.

Longtime subscribers know I like to end on a high note. So: yes, perhaps we barely mattered. Red Hook floods if someone spills a Big Gulp. But we used to wonder: should we? When? How? Are we even a we? Operation Skibidi answered us all at once: yes, now, flush, and look how many of us there are. Their so-called faits accomplis cannot take from us our power. Not when we want—maybe need—to believe in the shit heard round the world.