What New York’s burning woman tells us about our times

They used to say we lived in a ‘walk on by’ society. Now we live in something worse: a stop-and-film society. Yesteryear’s habit of hurrying one’s pace past a mugging or a kid being bullied is nothing compared with the latest trend for stopping, whipping out one’s phone and recording the wicked deed for clicks and likes on social media. The old heads-down shuffling away from crimes and misdemeanours spoke to a fraying of social bonds, sure. But this new urge to make a spectacle of people’s misfortunes, to document their suffering for the moral titillation of strangers online, speaks to a cult of voyeurism that is as inhumane as it is creepy.

Consider the burning woman on the New York subway. This, horribly, is how we must refer to her, given the authorities have not yet determined her identity. Three days before Christmas, on a chilly Sunday morning, she was asleep in a subway car passing through Coney Island when a man approached her and set her alight. The suspect in this vile crime is Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala. The victim is believed to have been a homeless woman. The indignities suffered by this lady are unconscionable: condemned to a life of vagrancy, and then to death by fire.

There is something that elevates this crime to a new realm of evil – the fact we were all spectators to it. Courtesy of the amateur filmmaking of individuals who found themselves on the same subway train as the burning woman, all of us bore witness to her final moments. Her pitiless fiery demise has become a kind of gross global entertainment. Phone-captured clips of her cruel end have been viewed millions of times. When the barbarous immolation of a homeless woman goes viral, you know something rotten is afoot.

I am not above it. I felt myself inexorably drawn into the mob of millions that gawped at this death by burning. It felt medieval. We fancy ourselves as so much more civilised than earlier human communities that would assemble in the town square to see a ‘witch’ be put to the flame. And yet here we are lapping up the spectacle of a hard-done-by woman being sacrificed to fire. And what’s more, retweeting it, WhatsApping it, adorning the sick images with cries of narcissistic angst, and in the process expanding the audience for this very modern burning. ‘I would never have attended a public execution’, we tell ourselves, even as we yell ‘Roll up, roll up!’ so that more souls might witness a woman’s combustion in 2024.

When I saw these snuff movies masquerading as reportage, I found myself thinking less about the man who started the fire, and even the poor woman who was consumed by it, and more about the people who filmed it. Yes, people. There was more than one. ‘Another angle on the subway burning’, people said online, as ever-more footage emerged of this foul crime. She had an audience. Her death was theatre. ‘Oh shit, oh shit!’, a man can be heard saying on one of the widely shared clips. Who knows how conscious the woman was by this point, but imagine if she heard that. Imagine if, having already suffered homelessness and a fiery assault, the last words she heard on this mortal coil were an onlooker’s wails of ‘Oh shit!’. The failure of humanity feels incalculable.

None of us knows how we would have reacted if we’d been present at this bestial sight. But wouldn’t our every instinct have been to do something? To smother the flames with our coats, to scream for a fire extinguisher? It is beyond dispiriting that such acts were absent. That people took out their phones not to dial the FDNY, but to film evil. I’ve read more than I should about how the woman likely adopted the ‘pugilistic stance’ seen in the clips because her muscles were contracting and her nerve endings were being severed by the fierce heat. But what I want to know is what severed the capacity for solidarity of the onlookers, meaning they filmed this unholy event instead of intervening, however forlornly, to try to stop it.

In a sense, they did intervene. Filming is intervention. They intervened not to save a life but to make a pageant of death. Not to douse the flames but to inflame the morbid curiosity of outsiders. And they are not alone. There was little unique in the behaviour of these New Yorkers. We live in an era of macabre rubber-necking. Every week now, we see amateur footage of some wanker heaping racial abuse on a person of colour on the bus, or clips of vile bullying filmed by schoolkids, or hazy vids of serious assaults, stabbings, even death. We’ve become desensitised to such grim footage, which is tragic. Because in every case our reaction should not be to ask friends ‘Have you seen this?’, but rather to ask ourselves: ‘Why was this filmed?’

For me, one of the worst cases of stop-and-film occurred in London in 2013, when soldier Lee Rigby was murdered and half-decapitated by two Islamist terrorists. An audience assembled. Running commentary was provided. ‘Ohhhh myyyy God!!!! I just see a man with his head chopped off’, tweeted one onlooker. Others dutifully filmed an impromptu speech by one of the terrorists. In the words of the Guardian, the killers ‘turn[ed] modern technology… into a tool of propaganda’. They ‘posed for pictures’ and ‘talked into cameras’ to ‘[justify] their slaughter’. All while their hands were ‘covered in blood’. That Londoners filmed these gloating religious hysterics, rather than rushing them and subduing them, was a sick sign of the times.

Sixty to seventy people gathered around the dying Lee Rigby, ‘all watching, some filming with their phones’. Idle spectators of Islamist butchery. Ingrid Loyau-Kennett, the French-born Brit who did intervene to check on Rigby’s condition, later wondered what was going on in people’s ‘heads’ that they were content to ‘watch and record the unhappiness of others’. We all should wonder this. To record the unhappiness of others, rather than try to alleviate it, speaks to a savage rupture in our civilisation. It feels like the corrosion of community bonds has meshed with the rise of new forms of tech to create these spectacles of feverishly shared suffering. The result is a desensitised public life, where other people are less our fellow citizens deserving of our every effort to support and save them, and more bit-part actors in our social-media psychodramas. Too many now approach society like David Attenborough approaches the natural world: as distant, curious observers rather than truly connected human entities.

In her classic, slim work, On Photography, Susan Sontag diagnosed that humanity now enjoys a ‘chronic voyeuristic relation to the world’. The cult of photography ‘convert[s] the world into a department store or museum-without-walls in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption’ and in which humans themselves become ‘item[s] for aesthetic appreciation’, she wrote. The problem, she said, was not the camera itself, but the withering of old, real bonds that means we increasingly engage with each other as voyeur and subject, rather than person and person. This trend has intensified to a terrifying degree, with tech exacerbating (not causing) this alienation of man from man, this transformation of us from fellow intimates of human society into aloof observers of it. We end up watching a woman burn, saying ‘That’s awful’, and then moving on to marvelling over Luigi Mangione’s fetching sweater. In 2025, can we please promise that if we witness human suffering, we will try to counter it?

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy