It starts on SewageTok. (Of course there’s SewageTok.) Late September someone posts a brief “fun fact”: New York’s sewers are its storm drains and its storm drains are its sewers and they dump raw sewage into the harbor whenever it rains hard. Like, tens of billions of gallons a year. By design.

It does okay for a short-form video about sewage. 300k views, comments full of “capitalism!” and “this is why we can’t have nice things”. Someone says “we should all flush at once to see what happens”. It’s clearly a joke.

But it really explodes when it hits every activist space simultaneously. See, everyone wants to do it (though no one admits it). Millions of millennial and Gen Z New Yorkers have never quite been able to express how it felt the world was turning to shit. Until now. Climate accounts pick it up. “They dump sewage in the river like Victorian London and we’re okay with this? The horseshoe crabs aren’t!” It’s environmental justice now. Housing organizers pile on. “They’d sooner spend billions on Cop City than millions on sewers, let’s make it come out to show them…” Labor unions slapfight: is it a “septic strike” or a “shit-in”? (Sort of moot—they all agree it’s praxis.) There’s causes now, respectable ones. Waiting for the cultural wet market to work its magic, someone makes a VHS-filter phonk edit with a countdown timer. Ice Spice reposts it. “8am oct 12th. everyone flush. show them overflow.” Who are “they”? Unclear. It’s divorced from context now. It’s aesthetic. Flooding as protest, overflow as metaphor, massive action as proof of power. Someone invokes Bataille. The framing evolves. Palestine solidarity accounts play dumb, then double down on the implications of a “flood” protest in October. #flushforpalestine. From the river to the sea. From the sewer to the Hudson to the harbor to the Atlantic.

And this is where it catches fire because it’s arguably the perfect crime. It takes zero courage, zero money, zero time. No physical risk, no arrest risk, plausible deniability, maximum symbolic fuck you to a system, a city, a society seen as complicit. The barrier to entry is literally nothing. And so participation numbers get real. The Ice Bucket Challenge needed filming and social performance. This needs you to wake up and take a shit. BDS got millions to boycott Starbucks. So somehow 10% participation starts seeming plausible for political action with so little friction (if one gets enough fiber).

Morning, Saturday the 12th. It’s raining, not quite Grey’s Anatomy out there but still. But then, eight o’clock. (And zero seconds.) 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. Treatment plants hit capacity. Sewage backs up into basements throughout southeast Brooklyn and Queens. Manholes pop in the Bronx. An automated system dumps tens of millions of gallons of effluent into the rivers and the harbor. The alternative is worse.

By six p.m. it’s over but the damage is done. Thousands of homes flooded, beaches closed for a week. Harbor stinks for a month. About a hundred million in damage and losses. Insurance ain’t covering shit. In theory the city has plumbers and emergency crews and vacuum trucks. In practice they have fifteen. We did it Reddit.

The gleefully euphemistic “critical infrastructure stress test” starts appearing in activist spaces as if it’s (snrk) business as usual. There’s copycats in Philly, Detroit, Boston. City, state, federal governments lose their minds but can’t articulate what law was broken. The National Guard is deployed, for some reason, and don’t have much to do but shovel shit in camo. Hearings are held. 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?

Perhaps we barely matter. The city argues were it not 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. Ads appear on buses: ZOHRAN WON’T PISS ON YOUR LEG AND TELL YOU IT’S RAINING. Waters are muddied.

And look—sure, Red Hook floods if someone spills a Big Gulp. But we used to wonder: should we? When? How? Are we even a we? The septic strike answered us all at once: yes, now, flush, and look how many of us there are. So their graphs and linear regressions cannot take from us our power. Not when we want—maybe need—to believe in the shit heard round the world.

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