When Gestures Replace Words: The Politics of Overwhelm

In July 2016, as mass shootings, Brexit, and the political rise of a reality TV host dominated headlines, Twitter user Katie Loewy offered a theory. "I'm not saying that David Bowie was holding the fabric of the universe together," she wrote about the recently deceased musician, "but gestures broadly at everything."

The tweet went viral instantly—not just for what it said, but for what it didn't say. The idea of Bowie as cosmic load-bearer was absurd, amusing, and somehow plausible. But gestures broadly at everything did something more powerful: it turned overwhelming chaos into knowing melodrama. Soon, variations appeared across the English-speaking internet: [gestures wildly at everything]; <gestures vaguely at everything>; [gestures around].

Those brackets and asterisks became eloquent punctuation for speechlessness itself.

The Boom Times for Inarticulate Language

Recent years have been a golden age for deliberately imprecise language. "Vibe" became a diagnosis. "Chaos" became an all-purpose condition. Dictionaries crowned "brain rot," "post-truth," and ambiguous emoji as words of the year. But [gestures around] might be the phrase that defines this decade.

It's a 2016 relic that, precisely because it's self-consciously speechless, captures the tensions of life in 2026. You can tell a lot about an era by its propensity for empty gestures. You can tell even more about ours by the fact that bracketed bewilderment has become cliché.

"I think it goes without saying that we are in shockingly unusual times," a federal judge declared last month during a case about mass protests and state violence in Minneapolis. She might have been referring to crises in Venezuela, Greenland, or thousands of other happenings—both obviously historic and subtly so—that make shock a reliable feature of everyday life.

When Words Fail, Democracy Suffers

"May you live in interesting times" was never quite the blessing it seemed. Interesting times can be incoherent. They can be maddening. This is why [gestures around] first caught on.

When Loewy tweeted about the universe's fraying fabric, she had specific ruptures in mind. Her Bowie-to-Brexit theory connected to both her politics and her London residence at the time. But her wording absolved her of specificity—and did the same for countless others who adopted her dashed-off gesture as common language.

Gestures broadly at everything commiserates without commitment. It assumes, correctly, that overwhelm transcends party lines. In a media environment delivering news through feeds, flows, and fire hoses—in what critics call the "end of endings"—overwhelm becomes inevitable. But it's also a profound concession that can become dangerous at population scale.

Overwhelm begets helplessness. Helplessness begets despair. Despair begets apathy. Each sensation makes us vulnerable by robbing us of elemental political power: the ability to understand what's happening around us and then talk about it.

The Theater of Political Speechlessness

[Gestures around] acknowledges this theft by embodying it. Using the phrase performs compressed theater: Here you are, trying to say something meaningful about the world; here you are, mutely and melodramatically failing.

The meme resonated in 2016 because it acknowledged what many thought: their explosive era was exceptional. Today it resonates for the opposite reason—shockingly unusual times have become our status quo. The past decade has found people striving for balance while rights, systems, and democracy itself have withered away.

It has given new ways to wonder about the difference between action and apathy, activism and slacktivism, complacency and complicity. [Gestures around], ever elastic, still speaks silently to overwhelm. But it has also become a way to ask: What do we do if the interesting times never end?

Democracy's Dependence on Words

American democracy takes words for granted. It relies on speech and assumes people can identify crises—distinguishing everyday dramas from scene-shifting ones—then react appropriately. Everything that makes [gestures around] useful as language makes it valuable as warning and opportunity.

Overwhelm is a personal experience that becomes political when it affects populations. Unchecked, it can unsteady people's sense of themselves as actors and agents, replacing words with empty gestures. But the meme also serves as a signal and potential rebuke to the comforting, misguided assumption that politics happens to other people.