Trainwreck: The Real Project X

Some entitled Dutch kids shared a Facebook event invite, two loser YouTubers incited aggression in the crowd for profit (they're still proud of that cause they are still losers "it was like being in a videogame" says this 52 year old narcissist), then the kids threw some guardrails around, then some police stopped it. 90% of who they spoke to were doing a lot of superficial uptalk about this willfully moronic 5 hour street-drinking event like it was years long war-time and their golden years of achievement. I've never been less impressed by people talking about something so utterly pointless with so much pride.

I cannot stress enough how much nothing happens in this documentary. Would you like a total recap? Once upon a time a bunch of party kids crowded a single street because they heard about a birthday party on Facebook. That's it. That's the story.

This nothing event (where, at worst, some police showed up and made noise to break-up the crowd) was practically as long as this doc itself. Barely an hour and you learn nothing except: some girl's birthday party went a little viral and then kids showed up making noise.

This is the bottom of the barrel for documentary topics. I mean, truly nothing to glean from any of this. Nothing happened worth remembering. Nothing happened to change anyone's lives. Nothing happened besides the above.

"Trainwreck" is almost becoming an ironic and appropriate title for this very series. They've covered a few interesting topics in their time. This one the most useless.

The documentary was a real disappointment. First of all, I found it completely unnecessary that the people involved didn't speak Dutch. That made it feel unbelievable. I still remember the day very well, and the media played a major role in escalating the situation. All the media were just waiting for riots to break out. That aspect was underrepresented in the documentary.

Merthe's story mostly just caused irritation. She was laughing more than showing any remorse. The same goes for the other people interviewed. All in all, it was not a pleasant documentary to watch. No police officers were interviewed. The residents of Haren were victims, but it was all treated like some kind of joke.

This feels like another superficial attempt by this Trainwreck series to only talk to the participants of what happened, without having a deeper dive or actually any experts who were not involved included in this thing to explain how this happened.

It is extremely clear how illiterate the participants are with technology and don't have a good grasp on how tech, social networks or algorithms work, however the showrunners thought it would be best just to blame this as a human behavior problem and not a technology problem, which is how this problem started in the first place: On Facebook.

This whole event was triggered when one user made the mistake of not setting a birthday party invite to private, saw her mistake, then tried to fix it on Facebook's mobile UI but couldn't because of its limitation to edit invites, and then the FB algorithmic took control to maximize reach to as many users as possible and turned this one mistake into a huge riot.

Additionally, Meta would not remove posts which were promoting the fake event, which multiple people and government officials were saying was not a real party and would also cause major safety concerns.

None of this was discussed during the documentary, and there's appears to be no attempt by the show's producers to out to Meta for a comment. Instead, all the blame was shifted to the people involved, and not the tools or platforms they were using.

Title says it all. A girl wanted to have a nice birthday celebration with her friends and then men stepped in and had to ruin everything. And they're so proud of it. I felt bad for her and her family. Worst episode of the Trainwreck series for me, because I didn't feel entertained, just angry and disappointed.