Last week, two news stories happened back to back: Apple announced new iPhones, and Charlie Kirk was killed. In the days after, I started to feel weird about everything that happened, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Until now.

On Tuesday, Apple announced iPhone 17, iPhone Air, and iPhone 17 Pro. As usual, these iPhones have better cameras and more features than the ones that came before it. Now, all of the back cameras are 48MP, and the front cameras are 18MP. They also include a new feature called Dual Capture, which allows you to record with the front and back cameras at the same time.

On Wednesday, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at event he was he was holding at Utah Valley University. He has a regular series where he debates college students on various political topics, and this was the first stop on a scheduled tour around the country. These events are usually recorded and posted online, and often go viral on social media.

To recap, Apple showed off their new products with new cameras and features, talking about all the beautiful moments you can capture on your phone. The next day, college students used their phone cameras to record a political assassination. As a result, there is high quality, up close video of the moment he was shot, as well as many videos of the chaos that unfolded immediately after. This is the reality of what these devices will be used for. You can capture horrific tragedies in stunning 4K resolution. And soon, with Apple’s new Dual Capture feature, you can record video of an increasingly violent country while also getting your live reaction.

But that was just the first thing that gave me weird feelings last week. The second has to do with the parallels between how Charlie Kirk got famous and how he died. As I said, he’s done many of these events on college campuses where he debates students. In a way, maybe it’s not too strange that a controversial person who hosts public events, challenging people to argue with him, was attacked at one of these events. At least until you consider the internet of it all.

Charlie Kirk made a name for himself, at least in part, because video of his campus debates would get circulated around social media. It didn’t matter how the video was edited, or whether it was being shared to agree or disagree with him, he was going viral. And on the internet, attention is the most valuable commodity.

In the wake of his death, some people in the media have said that on these campus tours, he engaged in good-faith debate. This is obviously untrue. Charlie Kirk was a propagandist. His job was to hold and defend a specific point of view. How else could he maintain a relationship with the president of the United States. That’s not to say that he was lying about what he believed. As Noam Chomsky said, “I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

Charlie Kirk was not in the business of honest debate, he was in the business of farming content. He spent much of his life engineering situations for the purpose of getting clips to go viral. And in a bizarre twist of fate, his death became the final viral moment. In a dark and horrific way, it all came full circle. The footage of his murder became more content.

To be clear, I’m not saying this is necessarily bad. I’m not sure it’s wrong or immoral to share video of what happened. You can argue that because he was a high profile political figure, footage of his assassination has real journalistic importance. I’m simply highlighting this odd symmetry between his life and his death that can only exist because of the internet.

Another thing that felt weird about last week is the videos that emerged from people who were there, showing the initial response to the gunshot. We could see the reactions of individuals, the movement of the crowd, and even footage of the shooter running across the roof of a building. Julia Alexander wrote a piece called “A Generation Posting Through It” where she perfectly summarized the strangeness of these videos:

One video I came across showed a TikTok creator filming people running from the shooting site, taking about 40 seconds to show the horrifying chaos surrounding students in attendance, but ending on a “make sure you subscribe” message. Nothing about the video’s existence is startling, which is in itself an alarming realization.

It gets weirder when you think about how many of these video sharing platforms can have a monetization component, so users can make money when their videos get a lot of views. Is this profiting from someone’s murder? Or is it fair compensation for video that has real journalistic merit? Or is it simply a way to throw someone a couple of bucks after they witnessed traumatic violence?

In 2018, Bo Burnham sat down with Grace Helbig to discuss his film Eighth Grade. Toward the end of the Q&A session, he said something that has always stuck with me:

This movie is not about, like— it’s not a Ted Talk. It’s not telling you what to think. It’s going, like, this is sort of how I think it feels; this is how the internet registers to me in my tummy.

I do think it’s worth talking about the ethics of how we use the internet, and it’s good to have a conversation about the ways in which the internet affects real life. But it’s also worth taking time for each of us to ask ourselves, “How does the internet make me feel?”

There it is again, that funny feeling.