The Internet Loves a Breakdown—Until It’s Yours
The internet eats people alive. It always has.
Britney. Kanye. Whitney.
Now, Onijah Robinson—a 33-year-old Black woman, stranded in Pakistan.
Eyes darting. Fifty microphones press into her face.
You saw it with Britney.
You saw it with Kanye.
You saw it with Whitney.
And you ate it up.
You laughed. You memed. You shared.
But did you ever stop to think about what it cost them?
Or did you just move on to the next?
Onijah isn’t the first.
She won’t be the last.
The next one is already in the algorithm’s teeth.
And you?
You’ll click.
You’ll scroll.
You’ll share.
You’ll watch.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Onijah Robinson isn’t just the latest sacrifice—she’s proof that the machine stays hungry.
A 33-year-old Black woman who catfished a 19-year-old Pakistani boy, fell in love, and believed the fairytale would hold when she stepped off the plane. It didn’t. He saw she wasn’t the white woman he thought she was. Family pressure made sure he walked away.
And now?
The comments are in Urdu—indistinguishable to me, but I already know what’s written between the lines.
Ayesha, my Pakistani-Swiss comrade, fluent in both the language and the cultural subtext, sends me a voice note. Her words hit like a reckoning.
“What I thought I was going to see, I saw,” she says. “Comments from every corner of Pakistani society—some laced with racism, others with misogyny.”
But what unsettles her most isn’t the predictable noise from men—it’s the chorus of women.
“Was I surprised? Sadly, no. Was I angered? Sadly, yes. Pakistani women—mothers, professionals, students, housewives—all lining up as gatekeepers of an insidious mix of patriarchy and religion, where judgment reigns supreme.”
Ayesha reads a comment aloud:
“She deserves this for leaving her family.”
And yet, not all the women came to gloat.
“There’s a subcategory of Pakistani women admiring Onijah for avenging herself. She gets to be seen. She gets to demand justice. And for some of them, that’s liberating—because most Pakistani women wouldn’t have the privilege to do any of the above. They are living vicariously through her.”
And just like that, Onijah becomes something bigger than herself. A spectacle. A symbol. A proxy war.
But what’s a viral moment without a payout?
$5K. Then $20K. They called it a scam. A grift. A disgrace.
But what was she supposed to do—sit there and go broke off her own breakdown?
There’s a reason every influencer with a ring light and a decent camera is rushing to break down Onijah’s story. It’s the same reason tabloids profited off Britney’s pain, why media companies built empires around Kanye’s unraveling, why Whitney’s tragedy became a genre of its own.
There’s money in the spectacle.
Just not for the people inside it.
The machine keeps feeding.
TikToks, stitches, reaction videos. Some called her a scammer. Others, a victim. Some made her a villain. Others turned her into a symbol. The machine doesn’t just amplify—it rewrites. Each take warps the truth a little more, until it’s not about what happened—it’s about who can make it go viral.
If you’ve never studied the gospel of How to Go Viral, let me break it down. Content is like a newborn baby—it needs food to grow.
And the food? Likes, comments, shares, saves.
Interaction is currency. Engagement is power.
From the moment that baby is born—dropped into the digital ether—the algorithm becomes its God. Watching. Measuring. Calculating its worth. The more it’s fed, the more the machine prioritizes its existence, pushing it to the front of your For You page, placing it in the mouths of commentators, turning it into discourse, a trending topic, a spectacle.
And just like that, Onijah wasn’t a woman in crisis—she was viral stock, traded in takes and reaction videos.
Watching Onijah being analyzed from every angle under the sun on our social media feeds reminds me of when I was 17, when I was something to be consumed.
A basketball prodigy with a long list of mid-major colleges knocking at my door, offering scholarships.
My name had currency.
My future had market value.
Until it didn’t.
The coach who recruited me was fired before I even arrived. The new coach looked at me and saw no investment worth salvaging.
The first time I was called into a game—he whispered, “Don’t f*ck it up.”
I did.
And that was it.
The ride was over. The leeches disappeared. The crowd stopped cheering.
I suffered a deep depression, though I never acknowledged it at the time.
But at least my failure wasn’t a trending topic. At least my unraveling wasn’t turned into content.
Onijah Robinson doesn’t get that mercy.
The machine doesn’t just discard—it immortalizes. Her lowest moment is pinned to the algorithm, looping forever.
Digital culture moves too fast for nuance.
TikTok, Twitter, Instagram—these streets thrive on knee-jerk takes. Hot before they’re right.
The game isn’t truth; it’s traction.
Misinformation spreads. Real events get chopped into memes. The algorithm eats controversy for breakfast.
This story had legs, more twists than the Monaco Grand Prix.
But any rational person, detached from the machine, could see: Onijah Robinson was unwell. Her own son said she was having an episode before she even left for Pakistan.
Still, the comments rolled in.
"She’s hilarious.""She needs her own show."
Were they oblivious, or just proving their allegiance to the machine?
Despite the viral clips of Onijah standing firm, I felt something else.
Sad and happy at the same time.
Happy that she found moments of power in a system built to erase her.
Sad because the Strong Black Woman trope was working overtime.
And when I saw her being wheeled into a medical facility?
I didn’t scroll.
For the first time, I stopped.
The world kept spinning, but I stayed right there—staring, breathing, waiting.
And then it hit me.
They let her breathe—but only when they were done watching.
Onijah isn’t the problem.
We are.
She’s the latest casualty of a system that devours people whole.
A Black woman undone by love, culture, and capitalism, thrown into the spectacle like so many before her.
And we?
We laugh.
We share.
We scroll.
Schadenfreude is the currency. Outrage, monetized. The algorithm feeds on us—on our thirst for the next breakdown.
Another meme.
Another moment.
Another sacrifice.
But what happens when the machine runs out of names?
When the spectacle isn’t enough?
Maybe it’s someone you love.
Maybe it’s you.
What if we stopped scrolling?
What if we demanded more?
The cycle spins on.
Until it doesn’t.
What happens when it stops?
Jonah Batambuze is a Ugandan-American interdisciplinary artist, cultural architect, and community builder remixing diaspora and identity into radical narratives of connection. As the founder and leader of two global communities—BlindianProject and South Asians for Black Lives, Batambuze creates spaces where shared histories turn into dialogues and action. His work cracks open the intersections of Black and Brown cultures, taking sonic memory, moving images, culinary traditions, and words and flipping them into tools for liberation
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