Down Periscope! Drunk Driving Mixes With The Newest Social Media

Don’t look now, but “Periscope” is officially a thing.

The social-media platform allows people to broadcast live from their phones whenever they like, thus bringing the average 23-year-old American woman just that much closer to her dream of becoming a fourth-rate reality television “star” at the expense of all other potential accomplishments.

I can see Periscope being of some use in the upcoming “American Spring” populist uprising, except for the fact that Twitter and Facebook and the like have long since decided to lick the boots of our corporate Ingsoc in whatever fashion is most deferentially pleasing to Mr. Obama, Mrs. Merkel, and Xi Jinping. So when the balloon goes up and you see me and Zack de la Rocha rolling a Viper ACR loaded with grenade launchers down the street, the Twitter “fail whale” will be all you can get, because anything else would be uncivilized.

The automotive world has used Periscope for a few new-vehicle reveals and a series of vignettes in which my friend Adam uses Turtle Wax™ to get some shine on his Isuzu Impulse. But it wasn’t until Whitney Beall of Lakeland … you guessed it … Florida, started Periscoping her drunk-driving adventure that the true potential of this newest navel-gazing “app” was well and truly revealed.

She’s lost! She’s drunk! She sure hopes she doesn’t get arrested!

But because the Lakeland Police Department doesn’t have Periscope installed anywhere (cue stock graphic of “Old Man Shakes Fist At Cloud”) [ Here you go. —Mark] one of the officers had to download it onto his phone so they could track Whitney down. When the cops found her, she promptly ran her new Corolla into a curb and flatted a tire. To the surprise of precisely no one, she did not pass a field sobriety test.

The video makes for interesting viewing because it conclusively demonstrates the so-called Millennial notion that nothing is happening, not even drunk driving, if you aren’t capturing it on social media and sharing it with your friends. Who would have thought that noted narcissist (and my personal hero) John Mayer would actually be ahead of the curve in telling people to see something with their own eyes instead of a camera(phone)? This woman’s addiction to the meaningless swirl of social-media interaction is such that she couldn’t even stop sharing long enough to get home without being arrested.

It’s also interesting to note just how well she handles the Periscope app despite being too drunk to drive. Either she’s faking it a bit, or the new generation is just that good with their mobile devices. Most of the time she has her face framed pretty well. Of course, Whitney’s little tableau wouldn’t be complete if she wasn’t listening to the lowest-common-denominator beeping-and-thumping psuedo-music possible — in this case, the thoroughly execrable AutoTuned dribbling known as “The Weekend”, soundtrack to a hundred thousand unintentional prole-pregnancies and just as many third-degree roach burns. (Trigger warning: The video contains Town Car crash footage.) Could Whitney have been trying to tell us something with her choice of music, other than the fact that she never managed to mail that application off to Sarah Lawrence? The lyrics might help…

I only call you when it’s half-past, five

So, ladies and gentlemen, here’s the “real” Whitney Beall, brought to you by … Periscope!