By JONATHAN KIM August 17, 2017
WASHINGTON – The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Computer Forensics Lab confirmed today that the remains of the career unearthed on Twitter earlier this year belonged to actor James Woods.
James Woods’s career was still thriving through the 1990s, but then familiar patterns started to emerge, explained Special Agent Tia Wong.
“When we first started investigating, we started to look for telltale signs,” said Wong. “Our techs had discovered some fragments of Tweets complaining about millennials and ‘special snowflakes’ and Colin Kaepernick, and those are generally strong indications that we’re following a trail of breadcrumbs left by a career that might be in danger of dying.”
“It’s frequently the case with a lot of these older, whiter, male, North American celebrities that their careers reach a point where the career itself is unable to continue to adapt and cope with new stimulus,” Wong continued. “If you look at the careers of people like Patrick Stewart, Betty White… even more contemporary cases like the careers of Sarah Silverman, and even Louis C.K. – whose career is actually a bit of an outlier, given predispositional factors – you can see a propensity for adaptation and even revitalization at times. The particular form of stagnation we’ve discovered in the case of James Woods’s career only seems to occur in white men, typically from the United States or Canada.”
Wong identified key warning signs to look out for. “You want to pay attention: Is the career starting to falter a bit because it can’t handle differing, emerging viewpoints? This typically manifests itself as attacking ‘safe spaces,’ without really understanding what a safe space is, attacking people as being ‘too sensitive,’ or ‘triggered.'” Wong added, “You’ll also see a fixation on cartoonish, old-fashioned masculinity that rewards stubbornness, an unwillingness to absorb new ideas, or the idea that people around you have somehow become ‘weak.’ You’ll especially see these warning signs in stand-up careers as they begin to disintegrate.”
Wong pointed to James Woods’s case. A white male Canadian actor who found popularity in the 1980s appearing in films like Videodrome, Woods started showing signs of a moribund career by the early 2000s. “We’ve managed to follow forensic trails as far back as 2006, thanks to a fragmented social media presence, but we can only wonder that if maybe people had seriously been paying attention to James Wood’s career, maybe these signs could have been caught, sooner.”
Aside from revealing more odious behaviors – including suing the family of a dead Twitter user for $10 million because the deceased called Woods a cocaine addict – Woods’s Twitter also displayed a few strong indicators that researchers consider red flags for impending career death.
“The big one is this Tweet where Woods complains about ‘political correctness,'” Wong said, indicating a Tweet where Woods whined, “[The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences] is not a club, nor a propaganda platform, nor an exercise in political correctness,” in response to criticisms that the Academy Awards had routinely passed over people of color… a reaction that Wong pointed out, “Implies that only white people are the ones actually worthy of recognition, while people of color lack the necessary talent and skill to excel. It’s symptoms like this that point to inevitable career death.”
Wong elaborated upon the tendency of dying careers to latch onto “political correctness,” saying, “I can’t say for certain why these careers inevitably attach themselves to this notion of ‘political correctness,’ that’s not really my department. A prevailing theory is that the career latches on as a means of sustenance, but ‘political correctness’ has been latched onto for so long that it simply can’t support any more careers at this point. I mean, we’re talking about something that careers have been latching onto for about forty years; you simply can’t whine about ‘political correctness’ over and over and over for that long before it becomes unsustainable.”
“This is where he had a meltdown because Twitter was banning accounts engaged in racist harassment,” Wong said, pulling up a Tweet reading, “Since @Twitter is now in the #censorship business, I will no longer use its service for my constitutional right to free speech. #GoodbyeAll.”
“Bear in mind, this is in response to Twitter banning accounts that had engaged in hate speech,” Wong said. “Even more than whining about ‘political correctness,’ tantrums over private companies refusing to support bullying or harassment – or any threat to those particular forms of ‘free speech’ – are major warning signs of career morbidity.”
Wong said that while in recent years, experts have managed to detect patterns and start to pick out these warning signs of a dying career much earlier in the career’s trajectory, for many the research has come far too late.
“If we had been more acutely aware of these indicators, perhaps we could have saved not only James Woods’s career, but also Dane Cook’s,” lamented Wong.
At press time, the FBI and local emergency response teams had been dispatched to both Adam Carolla and Joe Rogan’s residences.
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