For those of you who don’t know: Lindsay Ellis made a comment about Raya and the Last Dragon back when it came out in March. She said it had the same plot as Avatar: The Last Air Bender. Because...
Exemplary
For those of you who don’t know: Lindsay Ellis made a comment about Raya and the Last Dragon back when it came out in March. She said it had the same plot as Avatar: The Last Air Bender. Because both of these things are set in Asia, people accused her of being racist against Asians and that all Asian content was the same. An absurd accusation. This snowballed and she was SUPER Cancelled. Some of her YouTube colleagues and friends distanced themselves from her (as is the usual in these Breadtube type of spaces online). A former friend and film critic Jourdain Searles accused her of being racist, ableist, and so on, for a very long period of time.
It was a lot. And as someone that has also been cancelled on Twitter, I feel for her, though what happened to me is only a tiny fraction of the dog-piling that she received as I am not a famous YouTuber. But I still had a panic attack from everything that went down, I can’t even begin to imagine the stress she went through. And I grew up in the ghetto where some scary shit happened.
It’s great that she outright said cancel culture is real. I think people on the left are scared to admit it, and even when they do admit it they try to dress it up as something else. And certainly here on tildes we have a lot of people still adamant that it isn’t real and that people aren’t affected by it. It’s always a weird cognitive issue, not just on here but on Twitter as well, because people simultaneously say it isn’t real but that it’s also a good thing because it keeps people accountable for “their actions” or “their words.” People on Twitter even said that they were happy Ellis was finally being cancelled after years of her “problematic shit.” I also think it’s kind of easy to say stuff like “cancel culture isn’t real” and that none of this is a big deal until it actually happens to you. And I should know because that was me.
I’ve always liked Eliis. I used to watch the Nostalgia Critic when I was like 13, and I also watched some of her videos. Eventually when she moved on to video essays, and I discovered them when I was a later teen, I learned a lot from them. I learned a lot of basic essential stuff about film from her Transformers series and some of the videos she has on Mad Max: Fury Road. I haven’t watched her in years, I think the last video I saw of hers was her Hobbit video. I sort of just drifted away from her content, and YouTube in general when I started preferring to read film criticism and analysis. But having watched her for so long, it’s preposterous that anyone would accuse her of being a racist.
It unfortunately sounds like she has some sort of health problem, so I wish Ellis the best. She didn’t deserve anything that happened to her.
I find it useful to distinguish between "cancel culture" as a conservative talking point (which is partisan garbage) and "cancel culture" as a name for distributed harassment or public shaming --...
I find it useful to distinguish between "cancel culture" as a conservative talking point (which is partisan garbage) and "cancel culture" as a name for distributed harassment or public shaming -- a sort of personal DDOS attack. I think a lot of people are primed to respond to the first definition, especially because it is pushed so hard in conservative media, but the latter is a genuine problem and it's thoroughly non-partisan. Internet platforms have made it such that social dogpiling is both possible and desirable, and it happens at a scale that is staggering. I wish this were easier to talk about, because I'm tired of the "cancel" conversation boiling down into left vs. right bullshit which lets distributed harassment rage on unchecked.
Even a modicum of fame can cause someone to become a target for thousands, and then our tendency to rubberneck at controversy means this often spreads further, well beyond involved parties or even the individual's sphere of influence. Even if each individual person in the dogpile isn't doing something egregious, the accumulation of their efforts is still felt, singularly, by one person. Also, that's a best case scenario that pretty much never happens, because internet platforms like intensification, so takedowns tend to be harsher rather than kinder because those are the kind that get attention and spread.
No matter who you are, thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people either picking you apart or supporting those that do will fuck you up. In the rare cases where it's deserved (the Harvey Weinsteins of the world), social accountability has done its job where other societal measures for accountability have failed. Unfortunately, I'd argue that most cases of distributed harassment are undeserved, because even if what the target did wasn't okay, the social response is usually highly asymmetric in scope, completely dwarfing the original "misdeed".
The biggest problem I see is that, in the instances where the cancelling is outright unfair -- a bad faith takedown of someone that relies on malicious quoting, context collapse, and even potentially outright fabrication of evidence -- there's no corrective mechanism. There's no accountability for the "accountability" enforced by the mob. Who cancels the cancellers? Do all the people who piled on apologize with the same scope and fervor? Do they work to correct their mistake and restore the name and status of the person they dragged through the mud? Is there any restitution? Of course not. The damage gets done and felt by the individual who has no recourse even if they're in the right.
I think this kind of thing happens more than we really see or know. I'm an internet nobody and I faced a hatemob when a comment I made hit the frontpage of reddit. For every high profile case of someone whose harassment is big enough to make the news or show up in our feeds like Ellis's, there are dozens? hundreds? thousands? of everyday people out there dealing with blowback at a scale that far exceeds their personal scope.
I don't think that we, as humans, have really figured out how to deal with the absolute scale of the internet and globalism in general. Your comment hitting the front page of Reddit, I think, is a...
Exemplary
I don't think that we, as humans, have really figured out how to deal with the absolute scale of the internet and globalism in general. Your comment hitting the front page of Reddit, I think, is a perfect example of this and captures the issue with a message hitting the eyes of tens or hundreds of thousands of people. What you are referring to here many people used to call the 'price of fame' - that you were opening up your world to a lot of people and being able to parse that scale of information is incredibly tough.
As humans we are primed to recognize and prioritize our mental energy towards threats and danger. If you were an ancient hunter taking a step out of a cave and see a beautiful rainbow and a saber tooth tiger, your attention needs to be directed at the tiger, regardless of how useful seeing a rainbow might be to your mental health. Part of the problem here, however, is that threats and danger are often much more abstract in our modern lives - people can threaten your social standing or attack your character. At a small scale it can be quite important to pay attention to this as these people might be legitimate threats to say, your job, or your social circle, your family, and the relationships you hold. So we pay attention to them and as we grow up we learn to prioritize these threats into different categories and determine which ones capture our attention and which we can ignore. On a small scale it can be important to recognize these outbursts and let them capture our attention momentarily because people don't always share negative thoughts in this manner, and it allows us to appropriately manage who's in our lives and how we treat them.
This breaks down, however, because we exist in a world where we have different sized social circles of different importance to us. If you work in a large office and you have an encounter with someone who you basically never work with and they pose no real threat to your wellbeing, you may still be primed to pay a lot of attention to it. You pay attention to it because if this same threat happened from your significant other, or a smaller group of important friends, it would be incredibly important. The same can be true of a random encounter with someone who happens to share a hobby of yours - perhaps a local sports fan of the same team you root for shares a negative opinion. You may have never met or may never meet this person again, but you are exposed to them and what they are saying. Even on smaller scales like this, we run into problems where we prioritize and notice threats and danger even though it's of little importance to us because the way it presents mimics a situation in which the threat and danger is actually important. If you were to notice a saber tooth tiger in a video, or a long distance away you would also still notice this threat even though it poses you no immediate danger.
However, I believe the internet and globalization exposes us to threats in an even grander scale than our brains have learned to deal with. The absolute scale of it is something we don't know how to square away with our values and our attention. It used to be rare for us to experience situations in which we were exposed to hundreds if not thousands of individuals - large corporations, shared hobbies, etc. used to be the sole areas where this happened for most individuals. Celebrities and important figures such as politicians and people in charge of infrastructure which affected many used to be the only kinds of people who were exposed to this scale. Now the only thing stopping us from that exposure is how visible we are - the more prominent of a figure we become in any one area of the internet the more exposure we get, but every once in a while, something goes viral and captures the attention of many because of its uniqueness and we get a glimpse at the problems which arise at this scale.
I think perhaps the best way to frame this scale is to start thinking about it mathematically. If you can live your life socially exposed or interacting with roughly 100 people or less in your day-to-day life, how long is it before you run into a problematic person or find a threat which captures your attention? For example - how often have you received death threats? I would suspect that most of us have received maybe a dozen threats or less in the past decade or even their entire lives. This is an exceedingly rare phenomenon. For the purposes of simple math, let's consider a death threat something that occurs perhaps 0.01% of the time you interact with another person - or once in every 10,000 interactions. If you interact with an average of 10 people per day, you should expect one death threat every 1,000 days or maybe once every 3 years. However, if you are to post something on the internet and 10,000 people read it, statistically speaking you are likely to receive a death threat. Now imagine you have 50,000 twitter followers and 20% of them check your tweets every day - you're likely to receive a death threat every day. For the average person they are much more likely to fall into the first camp - occasional exposure to the absolute scale of the internet gives them an incredibly sour taste. It doesn't matter that you received 10,000 times the interactions and therefore 10,000 times the scale of positive interactions, it's the negative interactions scaling that capture your attention and sour the experience because we haven't dealt with that scale on a regular basis and know how to parse that information.
For the people who come into fame, I think the scale also works on an insidious level, but in a different way. We've talked about scale as in if there's just some flat percentage of positive and negative interactions, which is true if everything else is held steady. But the reality is that we exist in a world in which everything isn't held steady. If you say the same message to the same 10,000 people, you're likely to get the same response, but if you say a different message to the same 10,000 people their responses will be different. A positive statement about something political will elicit a different kind of response from a negative statement on the same issue. The rare person who issues you a death threat on a negative statement may praise you when it's positive and vice versa. For people who slowly come into fame, I believe they're able to start to learn the skills to parse this positively - they learn to ignore or delete or report the extremely negative responses and adapt to the scale. However, when someone famous does something that makes them temporarily viral, they are exposed to an even greater magnification of scale. These positive and negative statements get upped in frequency in a similar fashion, however, there's two additional factors at play which change the nature of the responses they get - jealousy and human nature.
Jealousy is fairly straight forward, and I think something that most of us understand, but perhaps are not exposed to in the way that famous people are exposed to it. If you are successful, you can draw the ire of people who are not. There are only so many famous and successful people, so their negative attention is directed at specific individuals. People tend not to have the kind of focus to direct this ire actively at too many individuals, so the incidence rate of negative experiences goes up proportionally the more famous or successful you happen to be. I think the closest analogy a regular person can understand this is in the reverse - any strong relationship you have likely has a component of an increased incidence rate of positive attention from a specific individual. It happens to be someone we have chosen, however, and isn’t quite analogous. The real analogy would be a stalker or someone who is ’out to get you’. These are rare for most people but become much more common the greater your exposure. It may be useful to think of this in terms of incidence rate as well – that you may encounter a stalker .001% of the time, but this won’t accurately capture how this incidence rate changes as your exposure changes because the person who is directing their ire or negative attention towards you is more likely to do this towards you if you happen to be someone with greater exposure. How many people do you think have an opinion of the president or Elon Musk? The likelihood of someone to have an opinion of either of these figures has both to do with whether an opinion is important to have on this person, and how the person’s exposure to the world directs our attention at them.
Human nature also contributes to a fundamental difference in how a viral message from someone of importance or exposure is both shared and commented upon. I use this as a loose category because it captures quite a few human quirks which change how we interact with this message. As has been mentioned before, humans prioritize what we feel are threats, but we also spend an outsized amount of time discussing and understanding threats. Sometimes we need to talk about a threat to others to understand whether it is a threat, or how big of a threat it is. There’s a social component to this as well – people standing guard need to identify to others why something is a threat and how big of a threat it is. We socialize threats to protect others. We also socialize threats because it can gain us social capital and help us to understand those around us and the values they hold. Humans are also often insecure and may latch on to negative public opinion and dogpile to make themselves feel better about the faults they have or to gain social capital among the people who are present to see them express that negative opinion. Humans are also socially influenced – if there’s an important discussion which has captured the public eye, they may be more likely to react or comment upon it. They may do this because it presents the ability to discuss something important to them, or they may do so to signal to their social circles their own values. This list of human tendencies is not exhaustive, but simply meant to capture how humans often interact with the world and how that shapes how likely we are to react to something and whether we wish to interact in a negative or positive way.
The way that these factors and scale interact with each other is where I believe many humans struggle to comprehend this kind of negative attention. It’s not important whether any one specific factor affects your response – what matters is that it can affect someone’s response. Keep in mind that we are operating at a scale which can include hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of people and we’re providing a platform in which every one of those people can provide input. This is an incredibly grim math problem of scale. While many of these interactions at scale for these famous individuals are operating at this scale, all we need is a single incident to explode to be exposed to an understanding of how these factors can increase a negative output by magnitudes which are incomprehensible to most of us. You see, when we participate in a discussion like this in a negative way on the internet, we’re typically not putting ourselves in the shoes of the person being persecuted. Hell, we’ve probably never interacted with them and in many cases, we will never interact with them. Their presence is so abstract in our lives that we may as well be throwing rotten fruit at a statue or the idea of a statue.
I mention all this because I greatly agree with what you’ve said here, and I think it’s an important distinction we need to be making. There are situations in which people do not grasp the gravity of what they are doing on the internet and are participating in a greater discussion that has happened to capture their attention. As you’ve mentioned this is some form of distributed harassment or public shaming – it is people publicly dealing with their insecurity, participating in a form of social discussion and debate, grandstanding, sharing opinions to signal worth to their social peers and many other factors. The people who group this in with ‘cancel culture’ are the people who do not understand on a basic level how scale and human proclivity interact with each other. They are only able to see scale. They believe that when someone is publicly harassed it is a problem of the internet being massive and that personal responsibility is not important nor is the how and why people are interacting with said content. It’s easy to hide behind the narrative that the internet is a huge hate machine but unable to recognize that hateful content also generates more hate than non-hateful and that non-hateful content can sometimes generate more hate than other non-hateful content depending on who is saying it, how they said it, when they said it, and where the discussion is taking place. It’s incredibly difficult to begin to wrap your mind among the nuances of problems at scale, so they conveniently ignore them to push a narrative that they were persecuted and that their hateful opinions which got them cancelled are equivalent to someone else suffering at the mercy of scale in a way that is perhaps not justified.
Incredible response (as usual), Gaywallet! There's a lot to chew on here. I really like this phrasing. The picture you're bringing to my mind here is one of acceleration. Someone who's already at...
Incredible response (as usual), Gaywallet! There's a lot to chew on here.
This is an incredibly grim math problem of scale. While many of these interactions at scale for these famous individuals are operating at this scale, all we need is a single incident to explode to be exposed to an understanding of how these factors can increase a negative output by magnitudes which are incomprehensible to most of us.
I really like this phrasing. The picture you're bringing to my mind here is one of acceleration. Someone who's already at speed can maintain that speed (i.e. a famous person used to fame likely finds their fame manageable). However, someone who is at rest (not famous) and who is nearly instantaneously accelerated to the same speed the famous person is moving at will suffer incredible consequences as a result of the change. It's not a perfect metaphor, but it helps me visualize one of the issues of scale you identified.
I also really like this part:
It’s incredibly difficult to begin to wrap your mind among the nuances of problems at scale, so they conveniently ignore them to push a narrative that they were persecuted and that their hateful opinions which got them cancelled are equivalent to someone else suffering at the mercy of scale in a way that is perhaps not justified.
I think this is a driver of a lot of issues. Someone will act in a very individual way -- cracking a joke, making a pithy comment, etc. -- and they'll see their action as an individual one, with no concept of scale. They'll do it, however, on a platform that creates that scale -- broadcasting it to hundreds or thousands of people, for example. This is the false intimacy of social media -- that it allows us to act as one but have it reach thousands.
When those thousands respond negatively, it can appear disproportionate to the person. Why is everyone dogpiling on them suddenly? Well, part of it is because they acted irresponsibly, without accounting for the audience for their message. They weren't acting in the individual, intimate way they thought they were.
On the other hand, those thousands often abstain from responsibility themselves, seeing someone's individual transgression as permission to go in for the public kill. Often the dogpile uses abusive tactics that go without scrutiny because the target is believed to be "fair game" or the abuse is believed to be supporting correct beliefs.
Which leads me to one of the other problems of the scale: with so many people involved, it is likely that there are "valid" and "non-valid" things all happening at once. I don't know a whole lot about Ellis, for example, but I suspect there are some valid criticisms among what she's received. I also suspect there's a whole lot of non-valid criticism as well. I also suspect she's been subject to outright harassment and threats. The scale at which things are operating means that each instance of a cancelling is a gigantic mess of all of these mixed together. We can follow individual threads from the outside, noting their merits or lack thereof, but for the target, those threads aren't experienced individually. They're all together and completely tangled up. Inseparable.
When I faced my hatemob on reddit, I wasn't thoughtfully considering the people giving my comment measured critiques because I was reading those right after bouncing off of messages calling me slurs or telling me I deserved assault. The reasonable threads got lost among the hate for me, because, like you identified, threats pull focus in a powerful way. My mental image for this is mixing two paint colors together. Once together, we can't umix them. When hate gets mixed into messaging, it's nearly impossible to separate it out and see the non-hate, even if it's technically the dominant color.
I don't know what we do about this, especially because it feels like long ago we just sort of embedded into internet culture the idea that threats are part and parcel of being online. Abusive discourse is normalized. Part of the reason I stick to Tildes is because this is one of the few places where we have cultural norms against that type of discourse as well as strong and unequivocal leadership should it arise. Of course, a big part of the reason we're able to have those safeguards is because we don't operate at scale here. It leaves me wondering whether we even could or not? Is the special sauce we have here scaleable, or is the special sauce simply a direct consequence of our smaller size?
I appreciated this post in trying to help my brain grasp these events- one item being the idea of many nuanced issues at scale being the problem vs. scale itself being the problem, because it is...
I appreciated this post in trying to help my brain grasp these events- one item being the idea of many nuanced issues at scale being the problem vs. scale itself being the problem, because it is easy to just blame the internet as being one big hate machine without digging deeper. I often feel that way about social media too (that I begrudgingly use and curate to an extreme extent to make it work for me)
I wonder- do positive things happen just as often at internet scale as the negative things do? The fact that they are likely reported on in different frequencies likely makes this difficult to assess. It's just disheartening to see the damage that humans can do at this scale. I want to try to remind myself of the positive things that can happen at this same scale, to combat this sinking feeling that we're doomed in some unfixable way to repeatedly encounter these problems- such as anyone having a voice saying a thing or two online being blown into surreal proportions that threaten their lives, jobs, families, and so forth.
Yes, positive things at scale absolutely happen! Sometimes stories of people who helped out their community can go viral and result in an outpouring of support. Art and artists can go viral and...
Yes, positive things at scale absolutely happen! Sometimes stories of people who helped out their community can go viral and result in an outpouring of support. Art and artists can go viral and see their careers come to fruition in a much shorter time frame that would have been possible without this kind of scale. People who are looking for donations can go viral or get spread among the right group and they're able to afford a medical intervention they need, raise money to help give back to their community, or create some good for the world. Stories about corruption or someone shafted by the legal system can catch on and cause people to be noticed by important lawyers or otherwise allow the world to help fix a targeted problem that captures their attention. New ideas or inventions can go viral and receive funding to bring them to fruition or scale. Even in situations in which someone draws a lot of negative attention, it can result in a lot of positive attention and outcomes for people's lives - Greta Thunberg is a recent figure which comes to mind. She's probably influenced much about the world despite drawing plenty of scorn from people who have a bone to pick with climate activism.
There are many ways in which positive energy, support, and action can happen at scale but in similar ways of how the negative can capture and hold our attention, we often don't let it occupy our thoughts or stop to give pause and be thankful. It may help to attempt to re-frame your own thinking by actively taking time out of your life to stop and take note of what you are thankful for and the positive that you see in the world. Take a week or a month and journal about it every day or a few times per week. The more you conscientiously pay attention to it, the more you will be able to recognize the good when it happens and spend your mental effort appreciating and supporting others instead of doom spiraling. 💜
Social attacks are vigilante justice. The problem with vigilantes is that they don't take the time to figure out whether someone actually deserves punishment. The line between someone who is...
No matter who you are, thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people either picking you apart or supporting those that do will fuck you up. In the rare cases where it's deserved (the Harvey Weinsteins of the world), social accountability has done its job where other societal measures for accountability have failed. Unfortunately, I'd argue that most cases of distributed harassment are undeserved, because even if what the target did wasn't okay, the social response is usually highly asymmetric in scope, completely dwarfing the original "misdeed".
Social attacks are vigilante justice. The problem with vigilantes is that they don't take the time to figure out whether someone actually deserves punishment. The line between someone who is guilty and someone who seems guilty can be incredibly blurry, even for highly organized court systems. Someone who gets a 280 character snapshot of a situation before passing judgement doesn't have a chance of getting it right.
I don't doubt the discrimination at all. As a social experiment, I've made a few reddit accounts with names more associated with femininity. The amount of criticism per post I got on those...
I don't doubt the discrimination at all. As a social experiment, I've made a few reddit accounts with names more associated with femininity. The amount of criticism per post I got on those accounts was much more than my usual non-gender or more masculine-sounding usernames. I think the worst I got, besides the political, was when I defended a cat. I guess I couldn't take a joke in that moment and I forgot details, I think one of those cutesy videos that's funny to us but not the cat, but reddit's not as cat-friendly as it appears. Of course the response you get is also how you phrase it, and my phrasing there was admittedly brash. Reddit, just like society, wants to domesticate you into being the common denominator, to fit in. If you're too far out one way or another, society sicks its dogs on you.
I've gotten enough hate for being an outsider and posing ideas that aren't politically correct within those groups that I've grown to hate tribalism. But of course we are powers which are drawn to and speak to other powers, there is less power in being an individualistic node and as they say, 'weakness is provocative' to bullies so you as a loner are a target in a less civilized world. And while the west is somewhat civilized in action, we are less so in word.
It's worth mentioning that she was also criticized for a number of other things, including writing fanfiction about a (fictional) enslaved person and slave owner being in a relationship - for...
For those of you who don’t know: Lindsay Ellis made a comment about Raya and the Last Dragon back when it came out in March. She said it had the same plot as Avatar: The Last Air Bender. Because both of these things are set in Asia, people accused her of being racist against Asians and that all Asian content was the same. An absurd accusation.
It's worth mentioning that she was also criticized for a number of other things, including writing fanfiction about a (fictional) enslaved person and slave owner being in a relationship - for which she didn't apologize, by the way. I agree that the Raya situation was pretty nonsensical, but acting as if that's all that was going on is pretty disingenuous.
But having watched her for so long, it’s preposterous that anyone would accuse her of being a racist.
This was not the accusation. There were a variety of specific accusations of specific instances of racism, of which some were (in my view) accurate and some were not. "Being a racist," as if it were an inherent quality, is not what was being alleged.
To be honest, while the discussion here has been pretty good, I'm a little concerned about how uncritically @cloud_loud's account of the situation has been accepted; it's accurate as far as it goes, but even Ellis's own >1hr response video was not merely a response to the Raya situation, and there are a number of incidents involved that weren't mentioned in that video at all.
This type of comment is the problem. This is vaguely implying that even though this criticism is baseless, there really is Very Valid Criticism of her out there. But all these other completely...
Exemplary
This type of comment is the problem.
It's worth mentioning that she was also criticized for a number of other things
This is vaguely implying that even though this criticism is baseless, there really is Very Valid Criticism of her out there. But all these other completely very real and deeply problematic things she's done are not actually presented here for the reader to analyze for themselves. The one actual thing specifically mentioned in the comment is a flat out lie [Edit: or, unsourced. It's occurred to me that maybe we're thinking of different incidents, and there's some other thing I'm not aware of.]
including writing fanfiction about a (fictional) enslaved person and slave owner being in a relationship - for which she didn't apologize, by the way.
She pondered in a tweet if anyone on the internet were terrible enough to have written ship fanfiction for the movie Harriet, like there's a lot of fanfiction out there for an unrelated popular ship that she considers abusive. But of course after this tweet has gone through the phone tag game of cancelling, it's being described as that she wrote fanfiction glorifying slavery. screenshot of the deleted tweet And she did apologize for this this tweet anyway, as the comparison does still make light of real historical brutalities. link to the timestamp of her video apology
This was not the accusation.
Are you sure? I'd be willing to bet a decent amount of money that there are dozens of tweets calling her a flat out racist, and worse. I'm not saying that everyone who criticized her was doing this. There were people who were dispassionately critically analyzing her behavior. But I also saw a whole lot of anime avatars performing high school bullying levels of harassment for clout.
Thanks for the thorough reply - I apologize for spreading misinfo uncritically. I think my takeaway from this is that relying on one's own memory - even of situations that I spent a fair amount of...
Thanks for the thorough reply - I apologize for spreading misinfo uncritically.
I think my takeaway from this is that relying on one's own memory - even of situations that I spent a fair amount of time looking into at the time - isn't sufficient, and that such discussions should always include directly linked context, as you've done.
Wait, she actually wrote fanfic? I thought that was another tweet...
It's worth mentioning that she was also criticized for a number of other things, including writing fanfiction about a (fictional) enslaved person and slave owner being in a relationship
Wait, she actually wrote fanfic? I thought that was another tweet...
She didn't, she just wrote a tweet wondering if someone wrote fanfiction about such a relationship, see @thetastelessturtle's post replying to the same parent comment.
She didn't, she just wrote a tweet wondering if someone wrote fanfiction about such a relationship, see @thetastelessturtle's post replying to the same parent comment.
I'm very much on the left, but I hate, hate, hate that large portions of leftie communities are so fixated on "purity", to the point where any and all missteps is justification to forever shun...
I'm very much on the left, but I hate, hate, hate that large portions of leftie communities are so fixated on "purity", to the point where any and all missteps is justification to forever shun someone. This sort of infighting leads to absolutely nothing but more and more alienation and fragmentation.
What annoys me the most is that the same people who canceled her for this probably have some skeletons in the closet themselves that would likely get them shunned under the same system. I mean, who hasn't done stuff they regret? No one is perfect. So why in the world was Lindsay this viciously attacked?
Such a huge shame, and I don't blame her at all for quitting. I would have done the same if basically all of the people and the places I thought were my support net turned their back on me. You can say that she could come back, and yeah I believe she could too. Financially she would have resisted because she does have a core audience, but as she clearly states in this, that doesn't mean her mental state would recover from it.
I wish her all the best wherever she may venture in the future.
Lindsay has been a target of the far right for a very long time. I wouldn't be surprised if the same people stood by until this controversy kicked off, then signal boosted the condemnation and...
Lindsay has been a target of the far right for a very long time. I wouldn't be surprised if the same people stood by until this controversy kicked off, then signal boosted the condemnation and added to the rumours going around. What's certain is this is a big win for them, as it makes the left look bad and it takes a big lefty voice off YouTube forever.
I can tell you that I saw plenty of threads on 4chan cheering all this on when it all kicked off. I don't think they're the main ones to blame (that would be Twitter itself) or that it's super...
I can tell you that I saw plenty of threads on 4chan cheering all this on when it all kicked off. I don't think they're the main ones to blame (that would be Twitter itself) or that it's super useful to make this conversation about extremism or whatever, but they certainly had a hand in it.
Very true, it would be wrong to make that the focus, there are a number of other things that are higher on the list. But I see people remark on how intense the dogpile on Lindsay was compared to...
Very true, it would be wrong to make that the focus, there are a number of other things that are higher on the list. But I see people remark on how intense the dogpile on Lindsay was compared to others, and that's my best explanation why it was.
All the more reason for them to shout even louder. Gotta cover up the cognitive dissonance with something.
What annoys me the most is that the same people who canceled her for this probably have some skeletons in the closet themselves that would likely get them shunned under the same system.
All the more reason for them to shout even louder. Gotta cover up the cognitive dissonance with something.
Yet another reminder to isolate and separate yourself from social media as much as you possibly can. I thought this blew over a long time ago, but apparently it's continued to churn and churn and...
Yet another reminder to isolate and separate yourself from social media as much as you possibly can. I thought this blew over a long time ago, but apparently it's continued to churn and churn and intensify and intensify...I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Ellis got fucked over here, and here we are left without one of the most important voices on the internet in the last few years. Aside from the Bezoses and the Chauvins, we all lose here.
Cancel culture does in some sense exist, though in a very different form than the typical right wing narrative over it...it's the result of taking well-meaning people who want to hold others responsible for being shitty and tossing them into an online environment which does everything it can to maximize outrage and conflict. People are not this bloodthirsty on their own. It's not a product of the left or of social justice or snowflakes or whatever it typically gets blamed on. The problem is a lot more simple than that:
Twitter makes money on it.
I deleted my Mastodon account as a kneejerk response with this. I managed to find an instance and group where I didn't have to worry about this kind of thing and I didn't really use the account that much...but whatever. I'm better off with a traditional blog.
They can be. There were angry mobs long before the internet was a thing. See for example the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Or school kids ostracizing fellow students for any perceived...
People are not this bloodthirsty on their own.
They can be. There were angry mobs long before the internet was a thing. See for example the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Or school kids ostracizing fellow students for any perceived social blunder. Social media sites amplify and capitalize on it, but they are playing on impulses that are already there.
When you mention the Reign of Terror it’s important to also note that this sort of mob action wasn’t just a default state of affairs. This was an extraordinary period of revolutionary change where...
When you mention the Reign of Terror it’s important to also note that this sort of mob action wasn’t just a default state of affairs. This was an extraordinary period of revolutionary change where public order, norms of conduct, and social trust had completely broken down. Post-revolutionary governments needs a few hundred years of continued conflict and steady iteration before a new, stable, and durable order managed to establish itself and trust could be restored.
The fact that this sort of thing is unfolding on social media and then spilling out into the real world suggests that these platforms are contributing to a similar breakdown of the social fabric the same way the revolutions of the early modern era dissolved the social orders that prevailed before the establishment of print culture. It has happened before, sure, but it’s not something I’d be sanguine about.
Each example you can think of has its own environmental causes and go beyond "people are shitty sometimes". I'm not saying social media is the first instance of this in history, but I am saying...
Each example you can think of has its own environmental causes and go beyond "people are shitty sometimes". I'm not saying social media is the first instance of this in history, but I am saying it's whipping people into acting like this at an alarming rate and at a scale we haven't really seen before.
I think you’ve probably got the right idea there. I’ve never really been big on social media but with so many businesses using it as a basis for hiring a posterity blog is probably the best that I...
I think you’ve probably got the right idea there. I’ve never really been big on social media but with so many businesses using it as a basis for hiring a posterity blog is probably the best that I could do. And the very first thing I should post there is why I’m not on any social media service.
Oof. I felt this one in my bones. Even for someone who hasn't been anything close to being canceled, This is what I feel so often when I venture out into the greater social spheres on the...
But all I know now is that being in the public eye at all is a losing game, and I regret all of it. I regret every time I’ve ever stood up for anyone - it always backfires. I regret every time I pushed back against something unjust - it was always just used to hurt me. I regret every time I ever stood up for myself - I never did it “correctly.” I regret every time I showed any vulnerability - just more ammunition to be used against me later. I regret every time I ever tried to play the game with peers and colleagues - they will drop you the second you aren't popular on Twitter anymore. It’s all hollow and brittle, and if there is one thing I have learned this year it is how eminently expendable I am. The good, progressive cis, straight, wealthy white men keep on trucking and coming out on top because deep down, they know that the systems they profess to stand against ultimately exist to benefit them.
Oof. I felt this one in my bones. Even for someone who hasn't been anything close to being canceled, This is what I feel so often when I venture out into the greater social spheres on the internet, especially in the last year or so. When you rise up against injustice, an injust world stands against you.
So I've been thinking about this for a while now and I had some feelings I wanted to put out there. I've dealt with depression for a long time, and while I have had friends with depression in the...
Exemplary
So I've been thinking about this for a while now and I had some feelings I wanted to put out there.
I've dealt with depression for a long time, and while I have had friends with depression in the past, I never had anyone who was really close to me deal with it. My sister has bipolar disorder, but she's too far away from me to ever experience what it's like to deal with someone going through that kind of situation.
I know I don't have any kind of relationship with Lindsay Ellis, but I do have a lot of empathy for her and her situation. I just happen to know that she's not terribly far away from where I live. But I know that even if I were to be able to go and do it in person, to tell her the things that I want her to know - that her standing up for what's right did mean something, that many people were touched by her efforts, that she's much more than the broken down person that she has been made to feel she has become - that she would not be able to hear it. And that's tearing me up inside.
I've always thought that the strongest weapon we had against darkness was love. Love was always the thing that made me able to fight my own depression. But now it kind of feels like I've discovered that love can sometimes be completely powerless. I'm thinking to myself, when I was a kid and my sister was dealing with my depression, did she feel the same way I do now, that whatever light my message of positivity may be, it will still fade away to nothing in the darkness of depression? I knew that I hurt people with my depression, but I never understood exactly how insidious it is. Especially when you know that the best you can do for that person is to just leave them alone with all of their pain and self-loathing and hope that they somehow get better.
If I did know where she lived, I would bake her a loaf of banana bread and drop it off to her. When words fail, sometimes actions can get through. When you're in a place where you think that the world would be better off if you're dead, the best thing you can have is physical proof that someone wants you alive. Even if it only lasts in this world for a few minutes.
The post has been made Patrons only, and I don't blame her. Our generation kinda gave up on saving the world when we learned that giant political-industrial complexes will do as they will, and we...
The post has been made Patrons only, and I don't blame her. Our generation kinda gave up on saving the world when we learned that giant political-industrial complexes will do as they will, and we made due with mindlessly beating on our allies who were "doing it wrong" or "can't be trusted with their platform" because at least we can get a "win" out of that.
If they have the mic, they have the platform, for better or worse. It's like "the big L vs. little l" libertarians that my friends talk about, where some people want a viable third party option...
If they have the mic, they have the platform, for better or worse. It's like "the big L vs. little l" libertarians that my friends talk about, where some people want a viable third party option that won't expand the state apparatus, and some people are compelled to abolish the driver's license cause it's government overreach, and both those people have to share a party.
What is "the Modern Left?" Are we referring to Leftists? Liberals? /r/antiwork frequents? Woke Capitalists?
Well, I vehemently agree with this comment but I confess I am at a loss of where it is coming from. I don't think requesting clarification as to who is specified by "the modern left" is unfair as...
Well, I vehemently agree with this comment but I confess I am at a loss of where it is coming from. I don't think requesting clarification as to who is specified by "the modern left" is unfair as anyone might have a different answer.
It appears @Wolf is the user who brought it up, you disagreed with the usage, and moocow1452 requested more exact terminology.
Also maybe moocow1452 suggested that a vocal minority is representative and I guess your comment... I don't know what your comment is about.
That whatever moocow1452 views as representative is such a minor blip in actual politics that it definitely isn't representative, perhaps? Although that probably isn't quite right because if someone has a "narrow" world view and thinks this group is representative then it clearly is representing the whole, at least to someone. I guess your comment expresses that in politics at large, it isn't representative because no one cares about a youtuber.
Did I follow you properly?
Edit: and the rest, while I agree, seems detached from the comment chain? I might still be missing a link, or perhaps you just wanted to share the rest of your thoughts in this comment?
Assuming that's what ht meant, I think I disagree. Sure, they're not directly involved in the political process, but leftie social media people are a part of the movement with tremendous reach,...
I guess your comment expresses that in politics at large, it isn't representative because no one cares about a youtuber.
Assuming that's what ht meant, I think I disagree. Sure, they're not directly involved in the political process, but leftie social media people are a part of the movement with tremendous reach, much like other more conventional media people. They're not politicians, but they're a prominent part of the discussion - and while there is more party-political and academic leftist discussion going on elsewhere, that doesn't mean that no one takes note of these toxic discussions and is then influenced in their willingness to be politically active.
The entire aspect of "not pure enough" in leftist discussions (i.e. where any past misstep or ideological/intellectual inadequacy is used to completely disqualify) seems to be conspicuously absent from other political circles; at least from the outside. And afaict, it's a recent phenomenon. It's intersectionality, I guess: Leftists and Social Media = worse than each individually.
There's certainly a discussion to be had about where that comes from and how we're going to make it go away. In defense of ht though, there's also an argument to be made that politics happens in other places too. What if there's a slap fight on leftie twitter and no one shows up? Where else should we go? Where should the good parts of twitter happen, if twitter always ends up in slap fights?
Is it? RINO was all over Fox News and AM radio in the 90's, the only change is that it can be done at home in either party.
The entire aspect of "not pure enough" in leftist discussions (i.e. where any past misstep or ideological/intellectual inadequacy is used to completely disqualify) seems to be conspicuously absent from other political circles; at least from the outside. And afaict, it's a recent phenomenon. It's intersectionality, I guess: Leftists and Social Media = worse than each individually.
Is it? RINO was all over Fox News and AM radio in the 90's, the only change is that it can be done at home in either party.
Yeah I think the purity politics is the exact same dynamic you find with fandoms and scenesters in general. A lot of leftist discourse attracts young people who are still forming their sense of...
Exemplary
Yeah I think the purity politics is the exact same dynamic you find with fandoms and scenesters in general. A lot of leftist discourse attracts young people who are still forming their sense of identity and belonging so they do the same in-group/out-group thing. Alt-Right groups target the same people and they also exhibit the same behaviors. It’s just that there’s more money towards astroturfing them so they get led around by the nose.
They also have no material power (owing to being young and early in their careers) and little life experience to round out the rough edges of their personalities and teach them how to make stuff happen realistically. So this sort of purity policing is really one of the only tool they have to feel like they’re accomplishing something. And it’s accessible to everyone without needing to do the “school of hard knocks” dues paying you might need to learn how to do actual stuff.
I think this is also why discourse tends to fixate on issues of identity, representation, or other things where there’s either no actual “right answer” or the goalposts can keep being shifted so you’re never good enough. The feeling of exercising power is worth more than any concrete, material outcomes so it’s going to look a lot like bikeshedding.
Beautifully put. Though I would stretch the definition of young people to include people in their early 30s as well. Who still seem to be in that late-teens/early 20s mentality of still trying to...
Beautifully put. Though I would stretch the definition of young people to include people in their early 30s as well. Who still seem to be in that late-teens/early 20s mentality of still trying to figure out their identity, trying to join specific clubs. I’ve seen many adults ten years my senior participating in the same purity policing that we see on Twitter. Probably due to the fact that millennials have less money and seem to be perpetually stuck in the adolescent/college part of their lives.
I’m in my early 20s, and I have no money, and I can relate to them. But it’s still odd to see them acting this way, a way that I associate with teenagers who spend way too much time on Twitter, when I feel like there should be at least some sense of maturity about the world.
Cynical hypothesis that I can't tell whether it's overly cynical or painfully true: Those adults, early 30s, those are the OG twitter/facebook crowd. They were growing up with social media, and it...
Cynical hypothesis that I can't tell whether it's overly cynical or painfully true: Those adults, early 30s, those are the OG twitter/facebook crowd. They were growing up with social media, and it did not end well for them. That's why they act like they're teens who spent too much time on twitter, because as teens, that's what they did.
Agreed, but I'd argue that it's not just young people trying to find themselves who have Fox News on as background television and Rush Limbaugh during their commute once upon a time. A lack of...
Agreed, but I'd argue that it's not just young people trying to find themselves who have Fox News on as background television and Rush Limbaugh during their commute once upon a time. A lack of power seems to be something going on across the board and saying that this behavior is a problem of the youths is probably not completely correct.
I don’t usually think of the Fox News types as being particularly fixated on ideological purity. Hardcore movement conservatives used to be in the 90s and aughts but I see less of it now, but it...
I don’t usually think of the Fox News types as being particularly fixated on ideological purity. Hardcore movement conservatives used to be in the 90s and aughts but I see less of it now, but it could also just be because I don’t hang out with as many of them as I used to.
Well, I don't know what exactly ht meant so your preemptive response might be a little hasty. It's true, though, that I guess I don't 100% agree on that. As I stated, it certainly can be...
Well, I don't know what exactly ht meant so your preemptive response might be a little hasty. It's true, though, that I guess I don't 100% agree on that. As I stated, it certainly can be representative to some people, and I'm not a good judge of what has an impact on larger scales.
I think you are mistaken about the aspect of "not pure enough" not occurring elsewhere. Anytime someone thinks something is unique to one person or one group, it almost certainly isn't.
Your last paragraph is thoughtful. I wish I had good answers too. Personally, participating in the smol web is my own solution. I also think that perhaps some elements of the experiment that is social media just won't pan out, and there isn't a "healthy" alternative or fix.
Yeah, the super visceral outrage reaction is hard to replace with something equally "addictive" but more productive. I mean, I subconsciously had the same thought when I wrote that: Surely, other...
I also think that perhaps some elements of the experiment that is social media just won't pan out, and there isn't a "healthy" alternative or fix.
Yeah, the super visceral outrage reaction is hard to replace with something equally "addictive" but more productive.
I think you are mistaken about the aspect of "not pure enough" not occurring elsewhere. Anytime someone thinks something is unique to one person or one group, it almost certainly isn't.
I mean, I subconsciously had the same thought when I wrote that: Surely, other groups do the same? But at least to me, subjectively, these kind of disagreements always happen in leftist circles. Even in more general, centrist/general political discussions outside of the US (though also on social media), the purity discussions (and various flavors thereof) tend to happen mostly against leftists. Which is to say: I don't have hard evidence for my claim, and my experience can be explained otherwise, but I don't really think that's all there is to this. Maybe it's because of more egalitarian structures and views, where hierarchy is minimal? Hard to use the hierarchy to defend yourself from criticism when there isn't one.
I'm not part of the right-wing discussiong, but I've heard similar criticisms of people on the right who don't live up to the idealized standards; "RINO" (Republican In Name Only) being a common one.
I'm not part of the right-wing discussiong, but I've heard similar criticisms of people on the right who don't live up to the idealized standards; "RINO" (Republican In Name Only) being a common one.
Oof. Haven't heard the "big L vs. little l" before but I've already made posts here on Tildes trying to explain why even though my policies don't align with removing drivers licenses, I also...
Oof. Haven't heard the "big L vs. little l" before but I've already made posts here on Tildes trying to explain why even though my policies don't align with removing drivers licenses, I also consider myself libertarian. I imagine the L is the party in this case, and the l is the superset of libertarian politics which includes a number of different outlooks and conflicting opinions.
Cases like Lindsay Ellis and Jenna Marbles have made me extremely cynical about the notion of "accountability" online. An accountability process, at least in person with ones friends, first begins...
Exemplary
Cases like Lindsay Ellis and Jenna Marbles have made me extremely cynical about the notion of "accountability" online. An accountability process, at least in person with ones friends, first begins with the wronged party raising an issue because they WANT for the relationship to be repaired. For example if a friend says something that hurt me, and I bring it up later, I could be doing it because I want to forgive them, or I could be doing it solely for the goal of making them feel bad. You'd have to be a real jerk to call a friend out just to twist the knife, and you'd lose someone you care about. So all the callouts I've made or that got called out on me had a completely different energy, where we all want to find a way to move on and make peace. And on the internet, most callouts are even worse in their motivations because you gain status for yourself by calling someone else out and knocking them down a peg. Most internet callouts begin with a desire to tear an enemy down.
And why did Lindsay have so many "enemies"? Honestly, I think it begins and ends with her personality and style of speaking being really annoying. (Well, annoying to some people). I feel like it created this well of anger in people, "How is this annoying mediocre woman with a bad personality so successful at a job that depends on her personality?"
Option A: People simply have different tastes and she only suits some of them.
Option B: It's all a conspiracy to prop up mediocre white woman and suck away the resources from more deserving creators.
So I see a lot of bitter people, white or not, landing on Option B and running with it, then believing every single thing Lindsay does is part of the Mediocrity Industrial Complex and she must be defeated at all costs. I don't think it's fair to blame "bad faith", the right wing, or malicious actors. There are a lot of people on the left who legitimately hate Lindsay and are tired of seeing her face pop up in Youtube recommendations. That's the simple beginning and end of it.
If I want to go full armchair psychology, I think it's because attention and kindness are two resources that are extremely scarce on the internet. People are bitter to begin with because they have not gotten the kindness or attention they needed, so when they see someone else getting it they start to think any sort of kindness or attention at all must be "deserved", and only the most perfect people deserve it. They think they are being noble by cancelling Lindsay and conserving resources.
Where this all gets volatile is that Lindsay herself has participated in some of these cancel culture shenanigans. No one is innocent, to be clear. I've done it too and anyone who is online a lot has as well. I wonder if being more introspective about the "why" would make people think twice before participating in a pile on. What made me feel such a strong sense of constant injustice that I'm looking to get relief by e-bullying a D list internet celebrity?
Edit: @NaraVara said it better, up thread: Original Comment Something else I’ve read it that younger (under-40s) folks have grown up with social media and the internet, but haven’t grown up with...
Yeah I think the purity politics is the exact same dynamic you find with fandoms and scenesters in general. A lot of leftist discourse attracts young people who are still forming their sense of identity and belonging so they do the same in-group/out-group thing. Alt-Right groups target the same people and they also exhibit the same behaviors. It’s just that there’s more money towards astroturfing them so they get led around by the nose.
They also have no material power (owing to being young and early in their careers) and little life experience to round out the rough edges of their personalities and teach them how to make stuff happen realistically. So this sort of purity policing is really one of the only tool they have to feel like they’re accomplishing something. And it’s accessible to everyone without needing to do the “school of hard knocks” dues paying you might need to learn how to do actual stuff.
I think this is also why discourse tends to fixate on issues of identity, representation, or other things where there’s either no actual “right answer” or the goalposts can keep being shifted so you’re never good enough. The feeling of exercising power is worth more than any concrete, material outcomes so it’s going to look a lot like bikeshedding.
Original Comment Something else I’ve read it that younger (under-40s) folks have grown up with social media and the internet, but haven’t grown up with the same opportunities. So they turn to internet callouts, which give them an opportunity to “make a difference”.
I’ve said this a lot less eloquently than the OP said, let me find it.
I read it a couple days ago, but I feel kind of conflicted after the fact. She posted it to a limited audience and I can see why. The people paying her deserve to know why she's quitting. But,...
I read it a couple days ago, but I feel kind of conflicted after the fact. She posted it to a limited audience and I can see why. The people paying her deserve to know why she's quitting. But, given what she's going through, I can't blame her for not releasing it to the wider world.
It seems ethically dubious to take content from a Patreon only post and publish it publicly.
Normally I would 100% agree, and I don't think I would ever share content directly from someone’s Patreon. However, given that 1) bits and pieces of the statement are already out there and being...
It seems ethically dubious to take content from a Patreon only post and publish it publicly.
Normally I would 100% agree, and I don't think I would ever share content directly from someone’s Patreon.
However, given that 1) bits and pieces of the statement are already out there and being analyzed and re-written by various parties, and 2) the full text has been posted by a reddit user, I thought it better to share her words in-full rather than have people speculate off of partial quotes or quotes taken out of context. If people can either read bits and pieces of it filtered through secondary sources or read the text from Lindsay Ellis herself, I think it's better that she be allowed to speak in her own words.
I also trust Tildes users to handle this information with compassion and respect rather than using it as fuel to further harass Ellis. I think her statement is powerful and that posting it here will bring her more support and hopefully more compassion. I would not post a link to her statement in a space that I felt would bring her more pain.
But, given what she's going through, I can't blame her for not releasing it to the wider world.
For sure. I'm glad she has a private space on Patreon where her fans can share their thoughts with her and she can be shielded from harassment by the paywall. I was not a regular watcher but she has my best wishes and I very much hope she can find some way to heal from this experience.
can somebody with access to the post explain what it means when she says goodbye? does she stop making videos? i'm a big fan of her work and would be very sad to lose it.
can somebody with access to the post explain what it means when she says goodbye? does she stop making videos? i'm a big fan of her work and would be very sad to lose it.
My initial plan was to leave YouTube for Nebula, but I realize now that this is only entrenching myself in a more intimate form of harm rather than the broad, buckshot kind that YouTube invites. I won’t go into detail (not right now, anyway), but I can’t do video content for them either. I can’t make content period. I just can’t do this anymore. There is no healing as long as there is attachment to the thing that makes you suffer, and the thing in this case is being in the public eye at all.
I hope she’s able to still make content. Maybe publishing new fiction under a pseudonym. She’s already gotten some industry recognition so I expect that to be at least remotely possible.
I hope she’s able to still make content. Maybe publishing new fiction under a pseudonym. She’s already gotten some industry recognition so I expect that to be at least remotely possible.
That's sad to hear as Ellis seemed to have pretty fair points, I've been a fan even if I'm more right-leaning than she is. Are we sure this isn't just manufactured drama, false flag, crisis...
That's sad to hear as Ellis seemed to have pretty fair points, I've been a fan even if I'm more right-leaning than she is. Are we sure this isn't just manufactured drama, false flag, crisis victim, etc? Because this would seem ridiculous even to the more left-leaning people I know. Those are words that conservatives like to use but they do it themselves, more on this tactic below.
People act like "cancel culture" is something new in human behavior. It's basically boycotting and shunning, something much much older and largely committed by the establishment, (edit: meaning has more power to execute effectively) which has historically had a conservative lean and why minorities have had a hard time getting a voice. What conservatives did with it is try to give it some catchy name to distinguish their use of that tactic from the way lefties use it. They did this with terms like "politically correct" when many times in history you'd get 'cancelled' or lashed out at if you said something against the often conservative-leaning status quo. There's also "virtue signalling", something conservatives have long done when trying to signal how moral they are (religious right especially), signalling their allegiance to a domain, signalling how rich they are, or signalling how special (snowflakes) they are in some way or another, which brings me to that term, snowflake. You know and I know that they think they're special snowflakes if not in demographic but in belief and usually think they're being persecuted because of their own special beliefs, special situations, etc. There's more of these terms but I've forgotten some.
But the point is, in political warfare, it's very hard to label one party as having one distinguishable human trait but if you can give it some catchy name that can distinguish your party from the other, you can use it as ideological warfare, despite the similarities. 'See, look at those people, they're not like us, they do this thing that we just made up that we don't do'. It's basically a form of advertising, give two identical jeans a different label, one with a more ambiguous and longer name, one with a catchier more fashionable name and see which one takes off; usually in this time and place, it's the shorter and catchier ones, just like image memes spread faster than essays. I don't know why liberals don't call them out on the hypocrisy. Needless to say both parties do these things yet you just validate their weapons when you use them, those terms, without calling the other party out.
Not that I really disagree with anything you've said generally, but I think framing this through political lenses isn't the right approach. There was something that could be said politically about...
Not that I really disagree with anything you've said generally, but I think framing this through political lenses isn't the right approach. There was something that could be said politically about this whole situation but I think it's more of to point out why the spectrum is a horseshoe shape, not a straight line.
Ultimately, Lindsay Ellis fell victim to extremism. To any reasonable viewpoint, this should amount to a shining example of cannibalism, fuelled by puritanism. Arguably, there has never been such a thing as non-hypocriticial puritanism, it's always been a movement that relies on somewhat unpredictable mob rule with the goal of feeding on suffering and pain of others. We've seen this documented in countless ways, fictional and non-fictional, and from any part of the political horseshoe spectrum of the day.
These are the people that right wing people always talk about when they vaguely and blithely refer to "leftist boogeymen" of some kind. No matter what end of the spectrum, any group (political or not) would always benefit from excising this angry, oozing mass of rage and hate away because they will invariably spread, grow, and start eating away at the healthy tissue.
The really sad thing about this is that I thought Lindsay Ellis' Mask Off video was the perfect demonstration of this hypocrisy, aimless rage, and extremely hostile nature of this group. And yet that hasn't been enough to bolster any mental aid or help for her since its release even though it was the kind of essay and argument (and even a little bit of journalism) that reasonable people of any political stripe should have been able to agree with and rally around. But that's a long-dead currency on the internet now, and the money is in outrage and suffering, not in reason.
Are you sure you're not defending her because you're in her tribe and just not giving others that disagree with her a fair and reasonable view? After reading a bit more about this on twitter,...
Are you sure you're not defending her because you're in her tribe and just not giving others that disagree with her a fair and reasonable view? After reading a bit more about this on twitter, ashamedly (and ironically because my tribe here has disdain for it as a debate medium), I'm willing to forgo my bias for her and question my view. And are you sure you're not giving into populism and identity politics (again, a term conservatives love to use but just as guilty as they often vote with whom they shallowly identify), defending her because you might be a fan or identify with her on a more shallow level? Perhaps they may view your view as the extremist one. I'm not sure where I stand until I have more information about it and chances are, I won't because I have little interest in it all other than commenting on the more meta aspects of it.
but I think framing this through political lenses isn't the right approach
These are the people that right wing people always talk about when they vaguely and blithely refer to "leftist boogeymen" of some kind
That's hard to do, as you yourself seem to fall prey to, when this is all about polities and their compositions from the start. I like to do this exercise when I have criticisms and for every point I may have on one side, try to find at least another point for the other side; a technique for the strongman argument. Now that doesn't totally divorce me, my self and ego, from the argument but I'd like to think makes me a more reasonable person. Do Ellis' opponents not have validity or have you sought out exactly what their criticisms are about her? I'll be honest and say I'll probably wind up biased towards her but I'm not going to call her opponents extremists. raging, boogeymen or whatever. There might be a few but there's always a few in every group.
I'm really confused what you got out of my last comment because it reads like you are responding to someone else entirely. I don't recognize even a small part of what I said represented or...
I'm really confused what you got out of my last comment because it reads like you are responding to someone else entirely. I don't recognize even a small part of what I said represented or acknowledged in your response here. Even the directly quoted bit doesn't meet the charge you level right after it.
Let me put this succinctly, you are a polity. You aren't divorced from politics, neither is this situation. I was asking are you being fair to others who criticize her by calling them hostile,...
but I think framing this through political lenses isn't the right approach.
Let me put this succinctly, you are a polity. You aren't divorced from politics, neither is this situation. I was asking are you being fair to others who criticize her by calling them hostile, raging extremists when they say mean things or joke about her when she says mean things and jokes about others. Are you sure you're not being biased? I know it's hard to break away from the tribe and your own ego to examine it truthfully, especially break away from the hive mind that plagues "(anti)social" communities but I'm truly asking are we being intellectually honest here or because we're fans, ie, she gives us our bread and circus so she gets free passes at being dismissive to others or a pass against criticism?
My last comment stands, almost exactly word-for-word. I really don't understand how you read what I said and came away with these responses. As best I can tell, you're not happy that I spoke about...
My last comment stands, almost exactly word-for-word. I really don't understand how you read what I said and came away with these responses.
As best I can tell, you're not happy that I spoke about the extreme ends of the spectrum and suggested that the people who perpetrate actions like these are extreme. I don't understand why this is the case when, to reinforce this protest, you've flattened out the morality and severity of the actions on "both sides", as it were. You act as if a sucker punch that leaves someone brain damaged is not an extreme response to a cutting remark about one's boots. I don't get it, were you actually defending cancel culture, virtue signalling, political overcorrectness and mob rule as misunderstood and reasonable actions that help keep mouthy people in line?
I don't understand how you came to take this position after your original comment—one that I was agreeing with—and began asking loaded questions that go in a completely different direction as if it is counterpoint and not a sharp left turn. I don't know how you read "we shouldn't look at this like conservative vs. liberal but as reason vs. irrationality" and decided to ask "is every criticism extremism?" I don't understand how the same person who made that first comment has written any of these responses.
I don't mind this, really. I'm in my element when I'm discussing online. As with work, it's labor but sometimes rewarding. But you mention the outrage of the other side, what you call extremists....
you're not happy
I don't mind this, really. I'm in my element when I'm discussing online. As with work, it's labor but sometimes rewarding. But you mention the outrage of the other side, what you call extremists. Are you sure you're not just outraged and not looking into the reasonable aspects of their views? After looking into it myself, it's not as black and white (extremist vs non-extremist) as it seems you think; there are some reasonable opposing views out there.
were you actually defending cancel culture
What I was defending is that it is embedded in human nature and you can take almost any group of people and tribalism will form and manifest that the group may shun outsiders, this is "cancel culture". Gods, I cringe when I have to say it as it's something very old only with a new fad-ish name. Shunning happens everywhere in instances where someone speaks against the tribe, be it on twitter, reddit, youtube, here, etc. People just want a convenient name so they can lash out at something. You'd feel stupid if you lashed out at 'people shunning and boycotting people and things they don't like' but it's of course more fashionable if it's got a short catchy name and it wouldn't distinguish your group as much also so you couldn't feel as vindicated and angry if you realized your group and yourself also does it.
decided to ask "is every criticism extremism?"
You mentioned extremism. I took it that you saw her criticism as extremism and the hosts of criticism as "boogeymen", not having any real validity.
I don't understand how the same person who made that first comment has written any of these responses.
Because I like to ask questions, sometimes seemingly contrary to my views to gain more knowledge. I think it works better if one wants to be fair and objective, ie, gain rounded knowledge. And sometimes if you want objective knowledge you have to accept contrary ideas, that opposing groups can have real valid complaints about the other, even if it means you lose social validation, friends IRL, get downvoted online, whatever. To me, objectivity is greater than social acceptance from tribes.
you've flattened out the morality and severity of the actions on "both sides", as it were. You act as if a sucker punch that leaves someone brain damaged is not an extreme response to a cutting remark about one's boots.
Which one happens to do when they want a more rational and objective view divorced from the drama. To me, your view is less rational and almost as "extreme" as you say of her critics. You want me to say her critics are trash? I'd love to and it's what I often think. I'm a fan of hers but the compounded tribalism and toxicity in this thread really makes me want to jump off the bandwagon here and look at it from a more rational and objective perspective. Gods forbid we do that here and go against the hive mind. Ironically this is, I'm sure, the toxicity she speaks about wherein you even give a faux hint that you might be on the other side or dare criticize all sides, you get downvoted and criticized into oblivion or "cancelled" to use the fashionable word.
Every place I go on the internet, it's full of 'look at this person and this group, let's gang up against them because they hurt my feelings or the feelings of someone in my tribe but let's not look into their legitimate points, let's just rage', etc. I can be guilty myself but I try to catch myself and try to be more understanding and less emotional. I'd like to think that Tildes is better than this, isn't it?
Reasonable opposing views aren't in question right now. Reasonable opposing views don't have results like this. There's no good logical avenue from "this is the result of extremist behaviour" to...
But you mention the outrage of the other side, what you call extremists. Are you sure you're not just outraged and not looking into the reasonable aspects of their views? After looking into it myself, it's not as black and white (extremist vs non-extremist) as it seems you think; there are some reasonable opposing views out there.
Reasonable opposing views aren't in question right now. Reasonable opposing views don't have results like this. There's no good logical avenue from "this is the result of extremist behaviour" to "criticism has caused this" unless you conflate "criticism" with "extremism". And that's just ridiculous.
It's also questionably vague language to soften the severity of the situation. We're talking about large-scale harassment campaigns targetted against individuals for the sake of hypocritical puritanism disguised as virtue, of the same ilk of Gamergate. Do you think "reasonable opposing views" and "criticism" is at all what people refer to when analyzing the end result that was Gamergate too?
And sometimes if you want objective knowledge you have to accept contrary ideas, that opposing groups can have real valid complaints about the other, even if it means you lose social validation, friends IRL, get downvoted online, whatever. To me, objectivity is greater than social acceptance from tribes.
I have told you twice that I don't see how you have acknowledged what I have said, and thrice you have continued to not demonstrate any attempt to do so. I don't know how else to take this statement as anything but hypocritical since you are shutting your ears to what I did actually say.
It's not objective to twist what someone else says and ask loaded questions filled with presuppositions that were never established before. If the other person does not even recognize what they said in the questions, you should consider if your questions have been twisted by your own thoughts so much that they've been rendered arbitrary, not double down on it.
For example:
I was asking are you being fair to others who criticize her by calling them hostile, raging extremists when they say mean things or joke about her when she says mean things and jokes about others. Are you sure you're not being biased?
The bolded bit not a qualification I even implied, it is of your own fabrication. You've actually changed what actions I've been speaking about to be able to ask this question at all, changing the nature of the issue in the process. You've asked an unfair question as I cannot answer yes or no because either would be acknowledging acts that I was never speaking about in the first place.
It's also a question based on a false premise as the group that led this harassment campaign are not the ones she says "mean things and jokes" about.
Which one happens to do when they want a more rational and objective view divorced from the drama.
No, that's an example of faulty logic—it's overreduction. If you have to change the facts about something to force a conclusion, you are creating a disingenuous argument. In this case, you overreducted a large-scale harassment campaign down to the level of making a joke about someone.
To me, your view is less rational and almost as "extreme" as you say of her critics. You want me to say her critics are trash?
See above about conflating "criticism" with "extremism", and then above about loaded questions. I cannot fairly answer this question because it does not respect nor acknowledge what I did say but fishes for a confirmation of a false implication.
Gods forbid we do that here and go against the hive mind. Ironically this is, I'm sure, the toxicity she speaks about wherein you even give a faux hint that you might be on the other side or dare criticize all sides, you get downvoted and criticized into oblivion or "cancelled" to use the fashionable word.
She has a 1h40m video about how it's not about any reasonable criticism but instead the extreme acts that certain extreme people have gone to lengths to. So no, your assumption here is false, and I don't know what you based it on outside of an attempt to force a conclusion using falsity.
I'd like to think that Tildes is better than this, isn't it?
This is an appeal to emotion and it's falling on deaf ears because you have been the aggressor in this exchange.
It sounds to me like you're trying too hard to get me offended at one party or another. You've failed as I'm not offended. What you're trying to fight is a power much larger than you and you're in...
It sounds to me like you're trying too hard to get me offended at one party or another. You've failed as I'm not offended. What you're trying to fight is a power much larger than you and you're in for a life of offense and feelings being hurt if you're going to ignore why these incidents exist and how to mitigate them. I understand them and do what I can to mitigate them. A lot of times just getting angry and outraged at people instead of trying to understand why they do what they do, either through stubbornness or not having the intellect to understand, will lead you to a bitter life. The universe is logical and there's a logical reason these people do what they do, you just don't like it. There's a logical reason you do what you do also, you just don't explain it logically, especially not in a way that can convince me to be mad at them.
Also the whole 'appeal to emotion' is a fallacy. Anyone who's studied philosophy won't just blow it off because underlying all the logic is motive (emotion), it is our base driver and to deny the validity of emotion is to deny who and what we are as a species. Emotion has driven many great art works, many causes for science and much of the great things about our culture. No computer can compute without energy, it's emotional driver, they are co-dependent. It's such a shallow remark as much as the other fallacious 'fallacies' you mention. I used to use them too but I've since learned their faults.
you have been the aggressor in this exchange.
Really? You replied to me. I didn't ask for you to convince me to be offended or find me a reason to be mad at people. I try to be fair and look at all sides and it just seems you're trying to get me to just see one side and as I just mentioned, you just blow away the emotional side yet your whole appeal seems rooted in emotion because the other side hurt your feelings so it seems.
In this case, you overreducted a large-scale harassment campaign down to the level of making a joke about someone.
With such scale to be harassed, she had such scale to harass. With much power to use comes much power to be used against. It's the nature of the world, that's what you should choose to get offended by, not by my words. She just as well used her might to speak detrimentally of others, which you don't mention, as some people do have legitimate complaints. And just because you write those people off as "virtue signalling", on that same token they could also write you off and see your complaints as just manufactured virtue signalling so you can get brownie points on your flavor of the week (anti)social media platform yet you don't and apparently you won't investigate their side, you just want to see your side because sometimes people just love to be angry and outraged, as you claim.
You can argue with me all you want but I can't take you seriously until you look into all sides equally and be fair. Maybe take your own advice about 'emotional fallacy' and ignore your feelings so you can look at it more objectively.
I have almost no interest in this myself but here I am, unfortunately. I'm usually just interested in the more meta of how these powers interact, not who's socially/morally wrong or right. Maybe that's why our arguments seem to be slipping past one another. I don't care who's wrong or right, because objectively you'd have to ultimately know the point of life so it's all just silly. Oh, but you want to get into philosophy and the relevance of subjectivity? Still, changes nothing about how these silly arguments will play out in the meta. In the end you still have to appeal to emotion using that lens but at least studying power interactions you don't wind up in these petty arguments as much and it's why I tend to avoid them.
This has now gotten to the point where you are claiming I have said things that are the exact opposite of what I actually advocated for or claimed, and have dreamed up entire arguments that...
This has now gotten to the point where you are claiming I have said things that are the exact opposite of what I actually advocated for or claimed, and have dreamed up entire arguments that actually are impossible for me to hold. Go back up and re-read where I did use the term "virtue signalling" and then try to square it away with how you think I used it here.
I can't imagine how this is possible unless you are actively trying to misunderstand everything I have said to the point that you are flat out lying about what I have expressed. I can't see how you can claim to be all about looking at things from multiple sides when you have so thoroughly fought against even the slightest attempt to understand anything I have said to such extremes. If I'm going to decry an example of virtue signalling, then this is it, as I am the victim of yours.
This is a petty argument of your own making. Clearly there are other things you should be studying to avoid them, like learning to listen to other people and not immediately fly off the handle if you feel challenged because you might find you were never being challenged in the first place.
I believe you are mistaking the people who participated in the boycotting, canceling, or whatever of Lindsay Ellis as extremists. I believe they are mostly normal people. Maybe some are repeat...
I believe you are mistaking the people who participated in the boycotting, canceling, or whatever of Lindsay Ellis as extremists.
I believe they are mostly normal people. Maybe some are repeat offenders, and have previously bandwagoned on twitter. But I'm confident a great number of individuals involved had never done this before.
I don't think it is unfair to make most mistakes at least once. It can be hard to avoid, especially while growing up. And we never really stop making mistakes categorically, they mostly just occur in our inexperienced domains.
I believe a lot of participants were swept away by the feeling of doing good, schadenfreude, either a feeling of being part of something larger or an obliviousness to the scope of the situation, and by underdeveloped or underapplied critical thinking skills.
I don't think there was anything remarkably "extremist" about many of the participants. The common denominator is that they were active on twitter and believed their own posts would be a positive contribution.
I only spoke about extreme actions and was very clear about what the nature of the people and actions taken were. I don't doubt there were many impressionable useful idiots involved, these things...
I only spoke about extreme actions and was very clear about what the nature of the people and actions taken were. I don't doubt there were many impressionable useful idiots involved, these things often involve them, and no extremist movement happens without these kinds of people. But I never said all her detractors were extremists, I said she was a victim of extremism. Those are very different statements.
I was very clear about what kind of subset of people I was talking about—ones who act with a very specific purpose in disingenuous and hostile ways that do not line up with their purported beliefs. I was putting the onus and responsibility on the architects of the outrage, not all participants. If you think that refers to all people that participated in it, then only you can answer how the scope expanded to cover all participants instead of the subset of those that did things like create false charges, manipulate information, and stoke the fires all for the goal of creating a hostile environment for a single person they set their sights on. Of course many participants didn't know better, that's how it works. But they still did something very bad and, lest they think a targetted harassment campaign is a good method to reuse in the future, it should be called out for the extreme act that it is.
If intent is the only thing that should be considered and not the quality of the actions, we might as well say the exact same thing about the January 6 rioters. People don't just trip and fall into doing extreme things accidentally, and most people who do extreme things often believe they are justified, in the right, and not being extreme or unreasonable. And yet we, as a society, judge their actions along with their intent because actions are important and they are responsible for how they choose to act on their intentions. Just because it's fun to participate in outrage and go with the mob does not make it reasonable to do so—that's why all those "mob" terms carry derogatory connotations. It's not aspirational.
There's nothing about this situation in which the large-scale harassment campaign targetted against an individual over a pithy tweet, or a number of relatively benign and harmless statements, was a reasonable response. It is always an extreme act, just as engaging in "swatting" is an extreme thing to do even if you approach it as "it's just a prank bro". Just as it is a mark of shame to have ever identified as a Gamergater, it should be a mark of shame to participate in a targetted large-scale harassment campaign under the guise of moral purity.
Sure, its an act of extremism in macro. But in micro, how many of the participants were fully aware of the scope of their actions? If three friends get mad at someone online for seemingly doing...
Sure, its an act of extremism in macro.
But in micro, how many of the participants were fully aware of the scope of their actions? If three friends get mad at someone online for seemingly doing "bad things", are they extremists?
They might just be shortsighted, easily misled, perhaps quick to jump to conclusions.
My point is that this one incident should not be sufficient enough to cordon off this swath of individuals as extremists who should be excised. This might be a mistake they can learn from.
Sure, it should be a mark of shame. But it doesn't need to be a red letter. It's enough if they reflect on their actions and grow. I don't know how participants could make amends for putting someone through extended duress by their actions online. Apologizing would be a start, but l doubt some apologies from randos will amount to anything.
Maybe more than "whether it was an extreme action", will they remain "extremists" their whole lives? Will one action buck the statistical trend that doesn't include a possibly unwitting part in large-scale harassment?
Edit: real quick, because I forgot:
I don't understand what you are writing at the beginning, where you contest the scope I applied? You say something about clearly deliniminating your scope and I need to explain why I've approached your comment as regarding everyone involved as extremists? Sorry, this is not clear to me, as far as I can tell you are positing that everyone involved in an extremist action is thusly an extremist.
Nobody's keeping a list of names about this. I'm not calling out individuals to be blacklisted forever. I spoke in general terms about a type of group that always shows up, in different forms and...
Nobody's keeping a list of names about this. I'm not calling out individuals to be blacklisted forever. I spoke in general terms about a type of group that always shows up, in different forms and from different directions, but always wearing the same cloak. There's no reason to take this as if I am calling for retribution against specific people and prevent them from having future growth opportunities over this specific situation.
In fact, my point was to get away from looking at it individually (by way of political tribalism originally, to be fair) and instead look at the entire way of thinking as poisoned so that people do not continue to accidentally fall for it, either on the pro- or anti- side of it, and no matter where on the spectrum it happens. It's a doomed prospect overall. I'm not speaking against individuals, I'm speaking against tolerance for such extreme behaviour from the root because that invariably leads to natural growth as people get taken in and swept up in the tidal wave, getting their hackles raised in the process, and turned into weaponry to be used against other people.
Okay, that all sounds awesome. You just want the act to be clearly identified as harmful and extreme to discourage people from engaging in such actions? What I am still confused by is if you are...
Okay, that all sounds awesome. You just want the act to be clearly identified as harmful and extreme to discourage people from engaging in such actions?
What I am still confused by is if you are implying it is the same group of people under every cloak. "A type of group that always shows up, in different forms and from different directions".
Either you mean the group that accumulates fills the same role, or the same type of individuals form a group. I think. And those are two different things.
I guess the later is still more agreeable than when I thought you were saying everyone involved is always an extremist, but it still suggests that any given person who participated can be identified apart from someone who didn't, as though they are a different type of person.
I already listed the things I think might be defining factors but I don't know if calling anyone with poor critical thinking skills a potential extremist or prone to extremism is fair?
Anyway, this is probably all moot as you just clarified you weren't intending to focus on the individual but rather what drives this abuse and how to prevent it.
To that I say, cultivate self awareness, cause and effect, and empathy? But at least some of these things are acquired developmentally and humans will naturally be at different stages of acquiring them.
Edit: oh, and tack on patience and humility. Both could go a long way I suspect.
For those of you who don’t know: Lindsay Ellis made a comment about Raya and the Last Dragon back when it came out in March. She said it had the same plot as Avatar: The Last Air Bender. Because both of these things are set in Asia, people accused her of being racist against Asians and that all Asian content was the same. An absurd accusation. This snowballed and she was SUPER Cancelled. Some of her YouTube colleagues and friends distanced themselves from her (as is the usual in these Breadtube type of spaces online). A former friend and film critic Jourdain Searles accused her of being racist, ableist, and so on, for a very long period of time.
It was a lot. And as someone that has also been cancelled on Twitter, I feel for her, though what happened to me is only a tiny fraction of the dog-piling that she received as I am not a famous YouTuber. But I still had a panic attack from everything that went down, I can’t even begin to imagine the stress she went through. And I grew up in the ghetto where some scary shit happened.
It’s great that she outright said cancel culture is real. I think people on the left are scared to admit it, and even when they do admit it they try to dress it up as something else. And certainly here on tildes we have a lot of people still adamant that it isn’t real and that people aren’t affected by it. It’s always a weird cognitive issue, not just on here but on Twitter as well, because people simultaneously say it isn’t real but that it’s also a good thing because it keeps people accountable for “their actions” or “their words.” People on Twitter even said that they were happy Ellis was finally being cancelled after years of her “problematic shit.” I also think it’s kind of easy to say stuff like “cancel culture isn’t real” and that none of this is a big deal until it actually happens to you. And I should know because that was me.
I’ve always liked Eliis. I used to watch the Nostalgia Critic when I was like 13, and I also watched some of her videos. Eventually when she moved on to video essays, and I discovered them when I was a later teen, I learned a lot from them. I learned a lot of basic essential stuff about film from her Transformers series and some of the videos she has on Mad Max: Fury Road. I haven’t watched her in years, I think the last video I saw of hers was her Hobbit video. I sort of just drifted away from her content, and YouTube in general when I started preferring to read film criticism and analysis. But having watched her for so long, it’s preposterous that anyone would accuse her of being a racist.
It unfortunately sounds like she has some sort of health problem, so I wish Ellis the best. She didn’t deserve anything that happened to her.
I find it useful to distinguish between "cancel culture" as a conservative talking point (which is partisan garbage) and "cancel culture" as a name for distributed harassment or public shaming -- a sort of personal DDOS attack. I think a lot of people are primed to respond to the first definition, especially because it is pushed so hard in conservative media, but the latter is a genuine problem and it's thoroughly non-partisan. Internet platforms have made it such that social dogpiling is both possible and desirable, and it happens at a scale that is staggering. I wish this were easier to talk about, because I'm tired of the "cancel" conversation boiling down into left vs. right bullshit which lets distributed harassment rage on unchecked.
Even a modicum of fame can cause someone to become a target for thousands, and then our tendency to rubberneck at controversy means this often spreads further, well beyond involved parties or even the individual's sphere of influence. Even if each individual person in the dogpile isn't doing something egregious, the accumulation of their efforts is still felt, singularly, by one person. Also, that's a best case scenario that pretty much never happens, because internet platforms like intensification, so takedowns tend to be harsher rather than kinder because those are the kind that get attention and spread.
No matter who you are, thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people either picking you apart or supporting those that do will fuck you up. In the rare cases where it's deserved (the Harvey Weinsteins of the world), social accountability has done its job where other societal measures for accountability have failed. Unfortunately, I'd argue that most cases of distributed harassment are undeserved, because even if what the target did wasn't okay, the social response is usually highly asymmetric in scope, completely dwarfing the original "misdeed".
The biggest problem I see is that, in the instances where the cancelling is outright unfair -- a bad faith takedown of someone that relies on malicious quoting, context collapse, and even potentially outright fabrication of evidence -- there's no corrective mechanism. There's no accountability for the "accountability" enforced by the mob. Who cancels the cancellers? Do all the people who piled on apologize with the same scope and fervor? Do they work to correct their mistake and restore the name and status of the person they dragged through the mud? Is there any restitution? Of course not. The damage gets done and felt by the individual who has no recourse even if they're in the right.
I think this kind of thing happens more than we really see or know. I'm an internet nobody and I faced a hatemob when a comment I made hit the frontpage of reddit. For every high profile case of someone whose harassment is big enough to make the news or show up in our feeds like Ellis's, there are dozens? hundreds? thousands? of everyday people out there dealing with blowback at a scale that far exceeds their personal scope.
I don't think that we, as humans, have really figured out how to deal with the absolute scale of the internet and globalism in general. Your comment hitting the front page of Reddit, I think, is a perfect example of this and captures the issue with a message hitting the eyes of tens or hundreds of thousands of people. What you are referring to here many people used to call the 'price of fame' - that you were opening up your world to a lot of people and being able to parse that scale of information is incredibly tough.
As humans we are primed to recognize and prioritize our mental energy towards threats and danger. If you were an ancient hunter taking a step out of a cave and see a beautiful rainbow and a saber tooth tiger, your attention needs to be directed at the tiger, regardless of how useful seeing a rainbow might be to your mental health. Part of the problem here, however, is that threats and danger are often much more abstract in our modern lives - people can threaten your social standing or attack your character. At a small scale it can be quite important to pay attention to this as these people might be legitimate threats to say, your job, or your social circle, your family, and the relationships you hold. So we pay attention to them and as we grow up we learn to prioritize these threats into different categories and determine which ones capture our attention and which we can ignore. On a small scale it can be important to recognize these outbursts and let them capture our attention momentarily because people don't always share negative thoughts in this manner, and it allows us to appropriately manage who's in our lives and how we treat them.
This breaks down, however, because we exist in a world where we have different sized social circles of different importance to us. If you work in a large office and you have an encounter with someone who you basically never work with and they pose no real threat to your wellbeing, you may still be primed to pay a lot of attention to it. You pay attention to it because if this same threat happened from your significant other, or a smaller group of important friends, it would be incredibly important. The same can be true of a random encounter with someone who happens to share a hobby of yours - perhaps a local sports fan of the same team you root for shares a negative opinion. You may have never met or may never meet this person again, but you are exposed to them and what they are saying. Even on smaller scales like this, we run into problems where we prioritize and notice threats and danger even though it's of little importance to us because the way it presents mimics a situation in which the threat and danger is actually important. If you were to notice a saber tooth tiger in a video, or a long distance away you would also still notice this threat even though it poses you no immediate danger.
However, I believe the internet and globalization exposes us to threats in an even grander scale than our brains have learned to deal with. The absolute scale of it is something we don't know how to square away with our values and our attention. It used to be rare for us to experience situations in which we were exposed to hundreds if not thousands of individuals - large corporations, shared hobbies, etc. used to be the sole areas where this happened for most individuals. Celebrities and important figures such as politicians and people in charge of infrastructure which affected many used to be the only kinds of people who were exposed to this scale. Now the only thing stopping us from that exposure is how visible we are - the more prominent of a figure we become in any one area of the internet the more exposure we get, but every once in a while, something goes viral and captures the attention of many because of its uniqueness and we get a glimpse at the problems which arise at this scale.
I think perhaps the best way to frame this scale is to start thinking about it mathematically. If you can live your life socially exposed or interacting with roughly 100 people or less in your day-to-day life, how long is it before you run into a problematic person or find a threat which captures your attention? For example - how often have you received death threats? I would suspect that most of us have received maybe a dozen threats or less in the past decade or even their entire lives. This is an exceedingly rare phenomenon. For the purposes of simple math, let's consider a death threat something that occurs perhaps 0.01% of the time you interact with another person - or once in every 10,000 interactions. If you interact with an average of 10 people per day, you should expect one death threat every 1,000 days or maybe once every 3 years. However, if you are to post something on the internet and 10,000 people read it, statistically speaking you are likely to receive a death threat. Now imagine you have 50,000 twitter followers and 20% of them check your tweets every day - you're likely to receive a death threat every day. For the average person they are much more likely to fall into the first camp - occasional exposure to the absolute scale of the internet gives them an incredibly sour taste. It doesn't matter that you received 10,000 times the interactions and therefore 10,000 times the scale of positive interactions, it's the negative interactions scaling that capture your attention and sour the experience because we haven't dealt with that scale on a regular basis and know how to parse that information.
For the people who come into fame, I think the scale also works on an insidious level, but in a different way. We've talked about scale as in if there's just some flat percentage of positive and negative interactions, which is true if everything else is held steady. But the reality is that we exist in a world in which everything isn't held steady. If you say the same message to the same 10,000 people, you're likely to get the same response, but if you say a different message to the same 10,000 people their responses will be different. A positive statement about something political will elicit a different kind of response from a negative statement on the same issue. The rare person who issues you a death threat on a negative statement may praise you when it's positive and vice versa. For people who slowly come into fame, I believe they're able to start to learn the skills to parse this positively - they learn to ignore or delete or report the extremely negative responses and adapt to the scale. However, when someone famous does something that makes them temporarily viral, they are exposed to an even greater magnification of scale. These positive and negative statements get upped in frequency in a similar fashion, however, there's two additional factors at play which change the nature of the responses they get - jealousy and human nature.
Jealousy is fairly straight forward, and I think something that most of us understand, but perhaps are not exposed to in the way that famous people are exposed to it. If you are successful, you can draw the ire of people who are not. There are only so many famous and successful people, so their negative attention is directed at specific individuals. People tend not to have the kind of focus to direct this ire actively at too many individuals, so the incidence rate of negative experiences goes up proportionally the more famous or successful you happen to be. I think the closest analogy a regular person can understand this is in the reverse - any strong relationship you have likely has a component of an increased incidence rate of positive attention from a specific individual. It happens to be someone we have chosen, however, and isn’t quite analogous. The real analogy would be a stalker or someone who is ’out to get you’. These are rare for most people but become much more common the greater your exposure. It may be useful to think of this in terms of incidence rate as well – that you may encounter a stalker .001% of the time, but this won’t accurately capture how this incidence rate changes as your exposure changes because the person who is directing their ire or negative attention towards you is more likely to do this towards you if you happen to be someone with greater exposure. How many people do you think have an opinion of the president or Elon Musk? The likelihood of someone to have an opinion of either of these figures has both to do with whether an opinion is important to have on this person, and how the person’s exposure to the world directs our attention at them.
Human nature also contributes to a fundamental difference in how a viral message from someone of importance or exposure is both shared and commented upon. I use this as a loose category because it captures quite a few human quirks which change how we interact with this message. As has been mentioned before, humans prioritize what we feel are threats, but we also spend an outsized amount of time discussing and understanding threats. Sometimes we need to talk about a threat to others to understand whether it is a threat, or how big of a threat it is. There’s a social component to this as well – people standing guard need to identify to others why something is a threat and how big of a threat it is. We socialize threats to protect others. We also socialize threats because it can gain us social capital and help us to understand those around us and the values they hold. Humans are also often insecure and may latch on to negative public opinion and dogpile to make themselves feel better about the faults they have or to gain social capital among the people who are present to see them express that negative opinion. Humans are also socially influenced – if there’s an important discussion which has captured the public eye, they may be more likely to react or comment upon it. They may do this because it presents the ability to discuss something important to them, or they may do so to signal to their social circles their own values. This list of human tendencies is not exhaustive, but simply meant to capture how humans often interact with the world and how that shapes how likely we are to react to something and whether we wish to interact in a negative or positive way.
The way that these factors and scale interact with each other is where I believe many humans struggle to comprehend this kind of negative attention. It’s not important whether any one specific factor affects your response – what matters is that it can affect someone’s response. Keep in mind that we are operating at a scale which can include hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of people and we’re providing a platform in which every one of those people can provide input. This is an incredibly grim math problem of scale. While many of these interactions at scale for these famous individuals are operating at this scale, all we need is a single incident to explode to be exposed to an understanding of how these factors can increase a negative output by magnitudes which are incomprehensible to most of us. You see, when we participate in a discussion like this in a negative way on the internet, we’re typically not putting ourselves in the shoes of the person being persecuted. Hell, we’ve probably never interacted with them and in many cases, we will never interact with them. Their presence is so abstract in our lives that we may as well be throwing rotten fruit at a statue or the idea of a statue.
I mention all this because I greatly agree with what you’ve said here, and I think it’s an important distinction we need to be making. There are situations in which people do not grasp the gravity of what they are doing on the internet and are participating in a greater discussion that has happened to capture their attention. As you’ve mentioned this is some form of distributed harassment or public shaming – it is people publicly dealing with their insecurity, participating in a form of social discussion and debate, grandstanding, sharing opinions to signal worth to their social peers and many other factors. The people who group this in with ‘cancel culture’ are the people who do not understand on a basic level how scale and human proclivity interact with each other. They are only able to see scale. They believe that when someone is publicly harassed it is a problem of the internet being massive and that personal responsibility is not important nor is the how and why people are interacting with said content. It’s easy to hide behind the narrative that the internet is a huge hate machine but unable to recognize that hateful content also generates more hate than non-hateful and that non-hateful content can sometimes generate more hate than other non-hateful content depending on who is saying it, how they said it, when they said it, and where the discussion is taking place. It’s incredibly difficult to begin to wrap your mind among the nuances of problems at scale, so they conveniently ignore them to push a narrative that they were persecuted and that their hateful opinions which got them cancelled are equivalent to someone else suffering at the mercy of scale in a way that is perhaps not justified.
Incredible response (as usual), Gaywallet! There's a lot to chew on here.
I really like this phrasing. The picture you're bringing to my mind here is one of acceleration. Someone who's already at speed can maintain that speed (i.e. a famous person used to fame likely finds their fame manageable). However, someone who is at rest (not famous) and who is nearly instantaneously accelerated to the same speed the famous person is moving at will suffer incredible consequences as a result of the change. It's not a perfect metaphor, but it helps me visualize one of the issues of scale you identified.
I also really like this part:
I think this is a driver of a lot of issues. Someone will act in a very individual way -- cracking a joke, making a pithy comment, etc. -- and they'll see their action as an individual one, with no concept of scale. They'll do it, however, on a platform that creates that scale -- broadcasting it to hundreds or thousands of people, for example. This is the false intimacy of social media -- that it allows us to act as one but have it reach thousands.
When those thousands respond negatively, it can appear disproportionate to the person. Why is everyone dogpiling on them suddenly? Well, part of it is because they acted irresponsibly, without accounting for the audience for their message. They weren't acting in the individual, intimate way they thought they were.
On the other hand, those thousands often abstain from responsibility themselves, seeing someone's individual transgression as permission to go in for the public kill. Often the dogpile uses abusive tactics that go without scrutiny because the target is believed to be "fair game" or the abuse is believed to be supporting correct beliefs.
Which leads me to one of the other problems of the scale: with so many people involved, it is likely that there are "valid" and "non-valid" things all happening at once. I don't know a whole lot about Ellis, for example, but I suspect there are some valid criticisms among what she's received. I also suspect there's a whole lot of non-valid criticism as well. I also suspect she's been subject to outright harassment and threats. The scale at which things are operating means that each instance of a cancelling is a gigantic mess of all of these mixed together. We can follow individual threads from the outside, noting their merits or lack thereof, but for the target, those threads aren't experienced individually. They're all together and completely tangled up. Inseparable.
When I faced my hatemob on reddit, I wasn't thoughtfully considering the people giving my comment measured critiques because I was reading those right after bouncing off of messages calling me slurs or telling me I deserved assault. The reasonable threads got lost among the hate for me, because, like you identified, threats pull focus in a powerful way. My mental image for this is mixing two paint colors together. Once together, we can't umix them. When hate gets mixed into messaging, it's nearly impossible to separate it out and see the non-hate, even if it's technically the dominant color.
I don't know what we do about this, especially because it feels like long ago we just sort of embedded into internet culture the idea that threats are part and parcel of being online. Abusive discourse is normalized. Part of the reason I stick to Tildes is because this is one of the few places where we have cultural norms against that type of discourse as well as strong and unequivocal leadership should it arise. Of course, a big part of the reason we're able to have those safeguards is because we don't operate at scale here. It leaves me wondering whether we even could or not? Is the special sauce we have here scaleable, or is the special sauce simply a direct consequence of our smaller size?
I appreciated this post in trying to help my brain grasp these events- one item being the idea of many nuanced issues at scale being the problem vs. scale itself being the problem, because it is easy to just blame the internet as being one big hate machine without digging deeper. I often feel that way about social media too (that I begrudgingly use and curate to an extreme extent to make it work for me)
I wonder- do positive things happen just as often at internet scale as the negative things do? The fact that they are likely reported on in different frequencies likely makes this difficult to assess. It's just disheartening to see the damage that humans can do at this scale. I want to try to remind myself of the positive things that can happen at this same scale, to combat this sinking feeling that we're doomed in some unfixable way to repeatedly encounter these problems- such as anyone having a voice saying a thing or two online being blown into surreal proportions that threaten their lives, jobs, families, and so forth.
Yes, positive things at scale absolutely happen! Sometimes stories of people who helped out their community can go viral and result in an outpouring of support. Art and artists can go viral and see their careers come to fruition in a much shorter time frame that would have been possible without this kind of scale. People who are looking for donations can go viral or get spread among the right group and they're able to afford a medical intervention they need, raise money to help give back to their community, or create some good for the world. Stories about corruption or someone shafted by the legal system can catch on and cause people to be noticed by important lawyers or otherwise allow the world to help fix a targeted problem that captures their attention. New ideas or inventions can go viral and receive funding to bring them to fruition or scale. Even in situations in which someone draws a lot of negative attention, it can result in a lot of positive attention and outcomes for people's lives - Greta Thunberg is a recent figure which comes to mind. She's probably influenced much about the world despite drawing plenty of scorn from people who have a bone to pick with climate activism.
There are many ways in which positive energy, support, and action can happen at scale but in similar ways of how the negative can capture and hold our attention, we often don't let it occupy our thoughts or stop to give pause and be thankful. It may help to attempt to re-frame your own thinking by actively taking time out of your life to stop and take note of what you are thankful for and the positive that you see in the world. Take a week or a month and journal about it every day or a few times per week. The more you conscientiously pay attention to it, the more you will be able to recognize the good when it happens and spend your mental effort appreciating and supporting others instead of doom spiraling. 💜
Thank you. Plenty of good points and ideas here. It's so easy to doom spiral and I want to safeguard myself from doing so as much as possible.
Social attacks are vigilante justice. The problem with vigilantes is that they don't take the time to figure out whether someone actually deserves punishment. The line between someone who is guilty and someone who seems guilty can be incredibly blurry, even for highly organized court systems. Someone who gets a 280 character snapshot of a situation before passing judgement doesn't have a chance of getting it right.
I don't doubt the discrimination at all. As a social experiment, I've made a few reddit accounts with names more associated with femininity. The amount of criticism per post I got on those accounts was much more than my usual non-gender or more masculine-sounding usernames. I think the worst I got, besides the political, was when I defended a cat. I guess I couldn't take a joke in that moment and I forgot details, I think one of those cutesy videos that's funny to us but not the cat, but reddit's not as cat-friendly as it appears. Of course the response you get is also how you phrase it, and my phrasing there was admittedly brash. Reddit, just like society, wants to domesticate you into being the common denominator, to fit in. If you're too far out one way or another, society sicks its dogs on you.
I've gotten enough hate for being an outsider and posing ideas that aren't politically correct within those groups that I've grown to hate tribalism. But of course we are powers which are drawn to and speak to other powers, there is less power in being an individualistic node and as they say, 'weakness is provocative' to bullies so you as a loner are a target in a less civilized world. And while the west is somewhat civilized in action, we are less so in word.
It's worth mentioning that she was also criticized for a number of other things, including writing fanfiction about a (fictional) enslaved person and slave owner being in a relationship - for which she didn't apologize, by the way. I agree that the Raya situation was pretty nonsensical, but acting as if that's all that was going on is pretty disingenuous.
This was not the accusation. There were a variety of specific accusations of specific instances of racism, of which some were (in my view) accurate and some were not. "Being a racist," as if it were an inherent quality, is not what was being alleged.
To be honest, while the discussion here has been pretty good, I'm a little concerned about how uncritically @cloud_loud's account of the situation has been accepted; it's accurate as far as it goes, but even Ellis's own >1hr response video was not merely a response to the Raya situation, and there are a number of incidents involved that weren't mentioned in that video at all.
This type of comment is the problem.
This is vaguely implying that even though this criticism is baseless, there really is Very Valid Criticism of her out there. But all these other completely very real and deeply problematic things she's done are not actually presented here for the reader to analyze for themselves. The one actual thing specifically mentioned in the comment is a flat out lie [Edit: or, unsourced. It's occurred to me that maybe we're thinking of different incidents, and there's some other thing I'm not aware of.]
She pondered in a tweet if anyone on the internet were terrible enough to have written ship fanfiction for the movie Harriet, like there's a lot of fanfiction out there for an unrelated popular ship that she considers abusive. But of course after this tweet has gone through the phone tag game of cancelling, it's being described as that she wrote fanfiction glorifying slavery. screenshot of the deleted tweet And she did apologize for this this tweet anyway, as the comparison does still make light of real historical brutalities. link to the timestamp of her video apology
Are you sure? I'd be willing to bet a decent amount of money that there are dozens of tweets calling her a flat out racist, and worse. I'm not saying that everyone who criticized her was doing this. There were people who were dispassionately critically analyzing her behavior. But I also saw a whole lot of anime avatars performing high school bullying levels of harassment for clout.
Thanks for the thorough reply - I apologize for spreading misinfo uncritically.
I think my takeaway from this is that relying on one's own memory - even of situations that I spent a fair amount of time looking into at the time - isn't sufficient, and that such discussions should always include directly linked context, as you've done.
Wait, she actually wrote fanfic? I thought that was another tweet...
She didn't, she just wrote a tweet wondering if someone wrote fanfiction about such a relationship, see @thetastelessturtle's post replying to the same parent comment.
I'm very much on the left, but I hate, hate, hate that large portions of leftie communities are so fixated on "purity", to the point where any and all missteps is justification to forever shun someone. This sort of infighting leads to absolutely nothing but more and more alienation and fragmentation.
What annoys me the most is that the same people who canceled her for this probably have some skeletons in the closet themselves that would likely get them shunned under the same system. I mean, who hasn't done stuff they regret? No one is perfect. So why in the world was Lindsay this viciously attacked?
Such a huge shame, and I don't blame her at all for quitting. I would have done the same if basically all of the people and the places I thought were my support net turned their back on me. You can say that she could come back, and yeah I believe she could too. Financially she would have resisted because she does have a core audience, but as she clearly states in this, that doesn't mean her mental state would recover from it.
I wish her all the best wherever she may venture in the future.
Lindsay has been a target of the far right for a very long time. I wouldn't be surprised if the same people stood by until this controversy kicked off, then signal boosted the condemnation and added to the rumours going around. What's certain is this is a big win for them, as it makes the left look bad and it takes a big lefty voice off YouTube forever.
I can tell you that I saw plenty of threads on 4chan cheering all this on when it all kicked off. I don't think they're the main ones to blame (that would be Twitter itself) or that it's super useful to make this conversation about extremism or whatever, but they certainly had a hand in it.
Very true, it would be wrong to make that the focus, there are a number of other things that are higher on the list. But I see people remark on how intense the dogpile on Lindsay was compared to others, and that's my best explanation why it was.
All the more reason for them to shout even louder. Gotta cover up the cognitive dissonance with something.
Yet another reminder to isolate and separate yourself from social media as much as you possibly can. I thought this blew over a long time ago, but apparently it's continued to churn and churn and intensify and intensify...I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Ellis got fucked over here, and here we are left without one of the most important voices on the internet in the last few years. Aside from the Bezoses and the Chauvins, we all lose here.
Cancel culture does in some sense exist, though in a very different form than the typical right wing narrative over it...it's the result of taking well-meaning people who want to hold others responsible for being shitty and tossing them into an online environment which does everything it can to maximize outrage and conflict. People are not this bloodthirsty on their own. It's not a product of the left or of social justice or snowflakes or whatever it typically gets blamed on. The problem is a lot more simple than that:
Twitter makes money on it.
I deleted my Mastodon account as a kneejerk response with this. I managed to find an instance and group where I didn't have to worry about this kind of thing and I didn't really use the account that much...but whatever. I'm better off with a traditional blog.
They can be. There were angry mobs long before the internet was a thing. See for example the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Or school kids ostracizing fellow students for any perceived social blunder. Social media sites amplify and capitalize on it, but they are playing on impulses that are already there.
When you mention the Reign of Terror it’s important to also note that this sort of mob action wasn’t just a default state of affairs. This was an extraordinary period of revolutionary change where public order, norms of conduct, and social trust had completely broken down. Post-revolutionary governments needs a few hundred years of continued conflict and steady iteration before a new, stable, and durable order managed to establish itself and trust could be restored.
The fact that this sort of thing is unfolding on social media and then spilling out into the real world suggests that these platforms are contributing to a similar breakdown of the social fabric the same way the revolutions of the early modern era dissolved the social orders that prevailed before the establishment of print culture. It has happened before, sure, but it’s not something I’d be sanguine about.
Each example you can think of has its own environmental causes and go beyond "people are shitty sometimes". I'm not saying social media is the first instance of this in history, but I am saying it's whipping people into acting like this at an alarming rate and at a scale we haven't really seen before.
I think you’ve probably got the right idea there. I’ve never really been big on social media but with so many businesses using it as a basis for hiring a posterity blog is probably the best that I could do. And the very first thing I should post there is why I’m not on any social media service.
Oof. I felt this one in my bones. Even for someone who hasn't been anything close to being canceled, This is what I feel so often when I venture out into the greater social spheres on the internet, especially in the last year or so. When you rise up against injustice, an injust world stands against you.
So I've been thinking about this for a while now and I had some feelings I wanted to put out there.
I've dealt with depression for a long time, and while I have had friends with depression in the past, I never had anyone who was really close to me deal with it. My sister has bipolar disorder, but she's too far away from me to ever experience what it's like to deal with someone going through that kind of situation.
I know I don't have any kind of relationship with Lindsay Ellis, but I do have a lot of empathy for her and her situation. I just happen to know that she's not terribly far away from where I live. But I know that even if I were to be able to go and do it in person, to tell her the things that I want her to know - that her standing up for what's right did mean something, that many people were touched by her efforts, that she's much more than the broken down person that she has been made to feel she has become - that she would not be able to hear it. And that's tearing me up inside.
I've always thought that the strongest weapon we had against darkness was love. Love was always the thing that made me able to fight my own depression. But now it kind of feels like I've discovered that love can sometimes be completely powerless. I'm thinking to myself, when I was a kid and my sister was dealing with my depression, did she feel the same way I do now, that whatever light my message of positivity may be, it will still fade away to nothing in the darkness of depression? I knew that I hurt people with my depression, but I never understood exactly how insidious it is. Especially when you know that the best you can do for that person is to just leave them alone with all of their pain and self-loathing and hope that they somehow get better.
If I did know where she lived, I would bake her a loaf of banana bread and drop it off to her. When words fail, sometimes actions can get through. When you're in a place where you think that the world would be better off if you're dead, the best thing you can have is physical proof that someone wants you alive. Even if it only lasts in this world for a few minutes.
The post has been made Patrons only, and I don't blame her. Our generation kinda gave up on saving the world when we learned that giant political-industrial complexes will do as they will, and we made due with mindlessly beating on our allies who were "doing it wrong" or "can't be trusted with their platform" because at least we can get a "win" out of that.
I think you have completely summed up my views on the modern left, being a leftist myself.
If they have the mic, they have the platform, for better or worse. It's like "the big L vs. little l" libertarians that my friends talk about, where some people want a viable third party option that won't expand the state apparatus, and some people are compelled to abolish the driver's license cause it's government overreach, and both those people have to share a party.
What is "the Modern Left?" Are we referring to Leftists? Liberals? /r/antiwork frequents? Woke Capitalists?
Well, I vehemently agree with this comment but I confess I am at a loss of where it is coming from. I don't think requesting clarification as to who is specified by "the modern left" is unfair as anyone might have a different answer.
It appears @Wolf is the user who brought it up, you disagreed with the usage, and moocow1452 requested more exact terminology.
Also maybe moocow1452 suggested that a vocal minority is representative and I guess your comment... I don't know what your comment is about.
That whatever moocow1452 views as representative is such a minor blip in actual politics that it definitely isn't representative, perhaps? Although that probably isn't quite right because if someone has a "narrow" world view and thinks this group is representative then it clearly is representing the whole, at least to someone. I guess your comment expresses that in politics at large, it isn't representative because no one cares about a youtuber.
Did I follow you properly?
Edit: and the rest, while I agree, seems detached from the comment chain? I might still be missing a link, or perhaps you just wanted to share the rest of your thoughts in this comment?
Assuming that's what ht meant, I think I disagree. Sure, they're not directly involved in the political process, but leftie social media people are a part of the movement with tremendous reach, much like other more conventional media people. They're not politicians, but they're a prominent part of the discussion - and while there is more party-political and academic leftist discussion going on elsewhere, that doesn't mean that no one takes note of these toxic discussions and is then influenced in their willingness to be politically active.
The entire aspect of "not pure enough" in leftist discussions (i.e. where any past misstep or ideological/intellectual inadequacy is used to completely disqualify) seems to be conspicuously absent from other political circles; at least from the outside. And afaict, it's a recent phenomenon. It's intersectionality, I guess: Leftists and Social Media = worse than each individually.
There's certainly a discussion to be had about where that comes from and how we're going to make it go away. In defense of ht though, there's also an argument to be made that politics happens in other places too. What if there's a slap fight on leftie twitter and no one shows up? Where else should we go? Where should the good parts of twitter happen, if twitter always ends up in slap fights?
Is it? RINO was all over Fox News and AM radio in the 90's, the only change is that it can be done at home in either party.
Yeah I think the purity politics is the exact same dynamic you find with fandoms and scenesters in general. A lot of leftist discourse attracts young people who are still forming their sense of identity and belonging so they do the same in-group/out-group thing. Alt-Right groups target the same people and they also exhibit the same behaviors. It’s just that there’s more money towards astroturfing them so they get led around by the nose.
They also have no material power (owing to being young and early in their careers) and little life experience to round out the rough edges of their personalities and teach them how to make stuff happen realistically. So this sort of purity policing is really one of the only tool they have to feel like they’re accomplishing something. And it’s accessible to everyone without needing to do the “school of hard knocks” dues paying you might need to learn how to do actual stuff.
I think this is also why discourse tends to fixate on issues of identity, representation, or other things where there’s either no actual “right answer” or the goalposts can keep being shifted so you’re never good enough. The feeling of exercising power is worth more than any concrete, material outcomes so it’s going to look a lot like bikeshedding.
Beautifully put. Though I would stretch the definition of young people to include people in their early 30s as well. Who still seem to be in that late-teens/early 20s mentality of still trying to figure out their identity, trying to join specific clubs. I’ve seen many adults ten years my senior participating in the same purity policing that we see on Twitter. Probably due to the fact that millennials have less money and seem to be perpetually stuck in the adolescent/college part of their lives.
I’m in my early 20s, and I have no money, and I can relate to them. But it’s still odd to see them acting this way, a way that I associate with teenagers who spend way too much time on Twitter, when I feel like there should be at least some sense of maturity about the world.
Cynical hypothesis that I can't tell whether it's overly cynical or painfully true: Those adults, early 30s, those are the OG twitter/facebook crowd. They were growing up with social media, and it did not end well for them. That's why they act like they're teens who spent too much time on twitter, because as teens, that's what they did.
A bleak prospect for my generation who had social media their whole lives.
Agreed, but I'd argue that it's not just young people trying to find themselves who have Fox News on as background television and Rush Limbaugh during their commute once upon a time. A lack of power seems to be something going on across the board and saying that this behavior is a problem of the youths is probably not completely correct.
I don’t usually think of the Fox News types as being particularly fixated on ideological purity. Hardcore movement conservatives used to be in the 90s and aughts but I see less of it now, but it could also just be because I don’t hang out with as many of them as I used to.
Seems like the new purity is loyalty to Trump or whatever the greviance of the week is.
Well, I don't know what exactly ht meant so your preemptive response might be a little hasty. It's true, though, that I guess I don't 100% agree on that. As I stated, it certainly can be representative to some people, and I'm not a good judge of what has an impact on larger scales.
I think you are mistaken about the aspect of "not pure enough" not occurring elsewhere. Anytime someone thinks something is unique to one person or one group, it almost certainly isn't.
Your last paragraph is thoughtful. I wish I had good answers too. Personally, participating in the smol web is my own solution. I also think that perhaps some elements of the experiment that is social media just won't pan out, and there isn't a "healthy" alternative or fix.
Yeah, the super visceral outrage reaction is hard to replace with something equally "addictive" but more productive.
I mean, I subconsciously had the same thought when I wrote that: Surely, other groups do the same? But at least to me, subjectively, these kind of disagreements always happen in leftist circles. Even in more general, centrist/general political discussions outside of the US (though also on social media), the purity discussions (and various flavors thereof) tend to happen mostly against leftists. Which is to say: I don't have hard evidence for my claim, and my experience can be explained otherwise, but I don't really think that's all there is to this. Maybe it's because of more egalitarian structures and views, where hierarchy is minimal? Hard to use the hierarchy to defend yourself from criticism when there isn't one.
I'm not part of the right-wing discussiong, but I've heard similar criticisms of people on the right who don't live up to the idealized standards; "RINO" (Republican In Name Only) being a common one.
Oof. Haven't heard the "big L vs. little l" before but I've already made posts here on Tildes trying to explain why even though my policies don't align with removing drivers licenses, I also consider myself libertarian. I imagine the L is the party in this case, and the l is the superset of libertarian politics which includes a number of different outlooks and conflicting opinions.
I'd love to just go back to Socialist.
Cases like Lindsay Ellis and Jenna Marbles have made me extremely cynical about the notion of "accountability" online. An accountability process, at least in person with ones friends, first begins with the wronged party raising an issue because they WANT for the relationship to be repaired. For example if a friend says something that hurt me, and I bring it up later, I could be doing it because I want to forgive them, or I could be doing it solely for the goal of making them feel bad. You'd have to be a real jerk to call a friend out just to twist the knife, and you'd lose someone you care about. So all the callouts I've made or that got called out on me had a completely different energy, where we all want to find a way to move on and make peace. And on the internet, most callouts are even worse in their motivations because you gain status for yourself by calling someone else out and knocking them down a peg. Most internet callouts begin with a desire to tear an enemy down.
And why did Lindsay have so many "enemies"? Honestly, I think it begins and ends with her personality and style of speaking being really annoying. (Well, annoying to some people). I feel like it created this well of anger in people, "How is this annoying mediocre woman with a bad personality so successful at a job that depends on her personality?"
Option A: People simply have different tastes and she only suits some of them.
Option B: It's all a conspiracy to prop up mediocre white woman and suck away the resources from more deserving creators.
So I see a lot of bitter people, white or not, landing on Option B and running with it, then believing every single thing Lindsay does is part of the Mediocrity Industrial Complex and she must be defeated at all costs. I don't think it's fair to blame "bad faith", the right wing, or malicious actors. There are a lot of people on the left who legitimately hate Lindsay and are tired of seeing her face pop up in Youtube recommendations. That's the simple beginning and end of it.
If I want to go full armchair psychology, I think it's because attention and kindness are two resources that are extremely scarce on the internet. People are bitter to begin with because they have not gotten the kindness or attention they needed, so when they see someone else getting it they start to think any sort of kindness or attention at all must be "deserved", and only the most perfect people deserve it. They think they are being noble by cancelling Lindsay and conserving resources.
Where this all gets volatile is that Lindsay herself has participated in some of these cancel culture shenanigans. No one is innocent, to be clear. I've done it too and anyone who is online a lot has as well. I wonder if being more introspective about the "why" would make people think twice before participating in a pile on. What made me feel such a strong sense of constant injustice that I'm looking to get relief by e-bullying a D list internet celebrity?
Edit: @NaraVara said it better, up thread:
Original Comment
Something else I’ve read it that younger (under-40s) folks have grown up with social media and the internet, but haven’t grown up with the same opportunities. So they turn to internet callouts, which give them an opportunity to “make a difference”.I’ve said this a lot less eloquently than the OP said, let me find it.
Someone on the Linday Ellis subreddit has posted the full text of her Patreon post, for anyone who wants to read it but isn't a subscriber.
I read it a couple days ago, but I feel kind of conflicted after the fact. She posted it to a limited audience and I can see why. The people paying her deserve to know why she's quitting. But, given what she's going through, I can't blame her for not releasing it to the wider world.
It seems ethically dubious to take content from a Patreon only post and publish it publicly.
She posted it publicly initially then privated it later.
Normally I would 100% agree, and I don't think I would ever share content directly from someone’s Patreon.
However, given that 1) bits and pieces of the statement are already out there and being analyzed and re-written by various parties, and 2) the full text has been posted by a reddit user, I thought it better to share her words in-full rather than have people speculate off of partial quotes or quotes taken out of context. If people can either read bits and pieces of it filtered through secondary sources or read the text from Lindsay Ellis herself, I think it's better that she be allowed to speak in her own words.
I also trust Tildes users to handle this information with compassion and respect rather than using it as fuel to further harass Ellis. I think her statement is powerful and that posting it here will bring her more support and hopefully more compassion. I would not post a link to her statement in a space that I felt would bring her more pain.
For sure. I'm glad she has a private space on Patreon where her fans can share their thoughts with her and she can be shielded from harassment by the paywall. I was not a regular watcher but she has my best wishes and I very much hope she can find some way to heal from this experience.
can somebody with access to the post explain what it means when she says goodbye? does she stop making videos? i'm a big fan of her work and would be very sad to lose it.
I hope she’s able to still make content. Maybe publishing new fiction under a pseudonym. She’s already gotten some industry recognition so I expect that to be at least remotely possible.
That's sad to hear as Ellis seemed to have pretty fair points, I've been a fan even if I'm more right-leaning than she is. Are we sure this isn't just manufactured drama, false flag, crisis victim, etc? Because this would seem ridiculous even to the more left-leaning people I know. Those are words that conservatives like to use but they do it themselves, more on this tactic below.
People act like "cancel culture" is something new in human behavior. It's basically boycotting and shunning, something much much older and largely committed by the establishment, (edit: meaning has more power to execute effectively) which has historically had a conservative lean and why minorities have had a hard time getting a voice. What conservatives did with it is try to give it some catchy name to distinguish their use of that tactic from the way lefties use it. They did this with terms like "politically correct" when many times in history you'd get 'cancelled' or lashed out at if you said something against the often conservative-leaning status quo. There's also "virtue signalling", something conservatives have long done when trying to signal how moral they are (religious right especially), signalling their allegiance to a domain, signalling how rich they are, or signalling how special (snowflakes) they are in some way or another, which brings me to that term, snowflake. You know and I know that they think they're special snowflakes if not in demographic but in belief and usually think they're being persecuted because of their own special beliefs, special situations, etc. There's more of these terms but I've forgotten some.
But the point is, in political warfare, it's very hard to label one party as having one distinguishable human trait but if you can give it some catchy name that can distinguish your party from the other, you can use it as ideological warfare, despite the similarities. 'See, look at those people, they're not like us, they do this thing that we just made up that we don't do'. It's basically a form of advertising, give two identical jeans a different label, one with a more ambiguous and longer name, one with a catchier more fashionable name and see which one takes off; usually in this time and place, it's the shorter and catchier ones, just like image memes spread faster than essays. I don't know why liberals don't call them out on the hypocrisy. Needless to say both parties do these things yet you just validate their weapons when you use them, those terms, without calling the other party out.
Not that I really disagree with anything you've said generally, but I think framing this through political lenses isn't the right approach. There was something that could be said politically about this whole situation but I think it's more of to point out why the spectrum is a horseshoe shape, not a straight line.
Ultimately, Lindsay Ellis fell victim to extremism. To any reasonable viewpoint, this should amount to a shining example of cannibalism, fuelled by puritanism. Arguably, there has never been such a thing as non-hypocriticial puritanism, it's always been a movement that relies on somewhat unpredictable mob rule with the goal of feeding on suffering and pain of others. We've seen this documented in countless ways, fictional and non-fictional, and from any part of the political horseshoe spectrum of the day.
These are the people that right wing people always talk about when they vaguely and blithely refer to "leftist boogeymen" of some kind. No matter what end of the spectrum, any group (political or not) would always benefit from excising this angry, oozing mass of rage and hate away because they will invariably spread, grow, and start eating away at the healthy tissue.
The really sad thing about this is that I thought Lindsay Ellis' Mask Off video was the perfect demonstration of this hypocrisy, aimless rage, and extremely hostile nature of this group. And yet that hasn't been enough to bolster any mental aid or help for her since its release even though it was the kind of essay and argument (and even a little bit of journalism) that reasonable people of any political stripe should have been able to agree with and rally around. But that's a long-dead currency on the internet now, and the money is in outrage and suffering, not in reason.
Are you sure you're not defending her because you're in her tribe and just not giving others that disagree with her a fair and reasonable view? After reading a bit more about this on twitter, ashamedly (and ironically because my tribe here has disdain for it as a debate medium), I'm willing to forgo my bias for her and question my view. And are you sure you're not giving into populism and identity politics (again, a term conservatives love to use but just as guilty as they often vote with whom they shallowly identify), defending her because you might be a fan or identify with her on a more shallow level? Perhaps they may view your view as the extremist one. I'm not sure where I stand until I have more information about it and chances are, I won't because I have little interest in it all other than commenting on the more meta aspects of it.
That's hard to do, as you yourself seem to fall prey to, when this is all about polities and their compositions from the start. I like to do this exercise when I have criticisms and for every point I may have on one side, try to find at least another point for the other side; a technique for the strongman argument. Now that doesn't totally divorce me, my self and ego, from the argument but I'd like to think makes me a more reasonable person. Do Ellis' opponents not have validity or have you sought out exactly what their criticisms are about her? I'll be honest and say I'll probably wind up biased towards her but I'm not going to call her opponents extremists. raging, boogeymen or whatever. There might be a few but there's always a few in every group.
I'm really confused what you got out of my last comment because it reads like you are responding to someone else entirely. I don't recognize even a small part of what I said represented or acknowledged in your response here. Even the directly quoted bit doesn't meet the charge you level right after it.
Let me put this succinctly, you are a polity. You aren't divorced from politics, neither is this situation. I was asking are you being fair to others who criticize her by calling them hostile, raging extremists when they say mean things or joke about her when she says mean things and jokes about others. Are you sure you're not being biased? I know it's hard to break away from the tribe and your own ego to examine it truthfully, especially break away from the hive mind that plagues "(anti)social" communities but I'm truly asking are we being intellectually honest here or because we're fans, ie, she gives us our bread and circus so she gets free passes at being dismissive to others or a pass against criticism?
My last comment stands, almost exactly word-for-word. I really don't understand how you read what I said and came away with these responses.
As best I can tell, you're not happy that I spoke about the extreme ends of the spectrum and suggested that the people who perpetrate actions like these are extreme. I don't understand why this is the case when, to reinforce this protest, you've flattened out the morality and severity of the actions on "both sides", as it were. You act as if a sucker punch that leaves someone brain damaged is not an extreme response to a cutting remark about one's boots. I don't get it, were you actually defending cancel culture, virtue signalling, political overcorrectness and mob rule as misunderstood and reasonable actions that help keep mouthy people in line?
I don't understand how you came to take this position after your original comment—one that I was agreeing with—and began asking loaded questions that go in a completely different direction as if it is counterpoint and not a sharp left turn. I don't know how you read "we shouldn't look at this like conservative vs. liberal but as reason vs. irrationality" and decided to ask "is every criticism extremism?" I don't understand how the same person who made that first comment has written any of these responses.
I don't mind this, really. I'm in my element when I'm discussing online. As with work, it's labor but sometimes rewarding. But you mention the outrage of the other side, what you call extremists. Are you sure you're not just outraged and not looking into the reasonable aspects of their views? After looking into it myself, it's not as black and white (extremist vs non-extremist) as it seems you think; there are some reasonable opposing views out there.
What I was defending is that it is embedded in human nature and you can take almost any group of people and tribalism will form and manifest that the group may shun outsiders, this is "cancel culture". Gods, I cringe when I have to say it as it's something very old only with a new fad-ish name. Shunning happens everywhere in instances where someone speaks against the tribe, be it on twitter, reddit, youtube, here, etc. People just want a convenient name so they can lash out at something. You'd feel stupid if you lashed out at 'people shunning and boycotting people and things they don't like' but it's of course more fashionable if it's got a short catchy name and it wouldn't distinguish your group as much also so you couldn't feel as vindicated and angry if you realized your group and yourself also does it.
You mentioned extremism. I took it that you saw her criticism as extremism and the hosts of criticism as "boogeymen", not having any real validity.
Because I like to ask questions, sometimes seemingly contrary to my views to gain more knowledge. I think it works better if one wants to be fair and objective, ie, gain rounded knowledge. And sometimes if you want objective knowledge you have to accept contrary ideas, that opposing groups can have real valid complaints about the other, even if it means you lose social validation, friends IRL, get downvoted online, whatever. To me, objectivity is greater than social acceptance from tribes.
Which one happens to do when they want a more rational and objective view divorced from the drama. To me, your view is less rational and almost as "extreme" as you say of her critics. You want me to say her critics are trash? I'd love to and it's what I often think. I'm a fan of hers but the compounded tribalism and toxicity in this thread really makes me want to jump off the bandwagon here and look at it from a more rational and objective perspective. Gods forbid we do that here and go against the hive mind. Ironically this is, I'm sure, the toxicity she speaks about wherein you even give a faux hint that you might be on the other side or dare criticize all sides, you get downvoted and criticized into oblivion or "cancelled" to use the fashionable word.
Every place I go on the internet, it's full of 'look at this person and this group, let's gang up against them because they hurt my feelings or the feelings of someone in my tribe but let's not look into their legitimate points, let's just rage', etc. I can be guilty myself but I try to catch myself and try to be more understanding and less emotional. I'd like to think that Tildes is better than this, isn't it?
Reasonable opposing views aren't in question right now. Reasonable opposing views don't have results like this. There's no good logical avenue from "this is the result of extremist behaviour" to "criticism has caused this" unless you conflate "criticism" with "extremism". And that's just ridiculous.
It's also questionably vague language to soften the severity of the situation. We're talking about large-scale harassment campaigns targetted against individuals for the sake of hypocritical puritanism disguised as virtue, of the same ilk of Gamergate. Do you think "reasonable opposing views" and "criticism" is at all what people refer to when analyzing the end result that was Gamergate too?
I have told you twice that I don't see how you have acknowledged what I have said, and thrice you have continued to not demonstrate any attempt to do so. I don't know how else to take this statement as anything but hypocritical since you are shutting your ears to what I did actually say.
It's not objective to twist what someone else says and ask loaded questions filled with presuppositions that were never established before. If the other person does not even recognize what they said in the questions, you should consider if your questions have been twisted by your own thoughts so much that they've been rendered arbitrary, not double down on it.
For example:
The bolded bit not a qualification I even implied, it is of your own fabrication. You've actually changed what actions I've been speaking about to be able to ask this question at all, changing the nature of the issue in the process. You've asked an unfair question as I cannot answer yes or no because either would be acknowledging acts that I was never speaking about in the first place.
It's also a question based on a false premise as the group that led this harassment campaign are not the ones she says "mean things and jokes" about.
No, that's an example of faulty logic—it's overreduction. If you have to change the facts about something to force a conclusion, you are creating a disingenuous argument. In this case, you overreducted a large-scale harassment campaign down to the level of making a joke about someone.
See above about conflating "criticism" with "extremism", and then above about loaded questions. I cannot fairly answer this question because it does not respect nor acknowledge what I did say but fishes for a confirmation of a false implication.
She has a 1h40m video about how it's not about any reasonable criticism but instead the extreme acts that certain extreme people have gone to lengths to. So no, your assumption here is false, and I don't know what you based it on outside of an attempt to force a conclusion using falsity.
This is an appeal to emotion and it's falling on deaf ears because you have been the aggressor in this exchange.
It sounds to me like you're trying too hard to get me offended at one party or another. You've failed as I'm not offended. What you're trying to fight is a power much larger than you and you're in for a life of offense and feelings being hurt if you're going to ignore why these incidents exist and how to mitigate them. I understand them and do what I can to mitigate them. A lot of times just getting angry and outraged at people instead of trying to understand why they do what they do, either through stubbornness or not having the intellect to understand, will lead you to a bitter life. The universe is logical and there's a logical reason these people do what they do, you just don't like it. There's a logical reason you do what you do also, you just don't explain it logically, especially not in a way that can convince me to be mad at them.
Also the whole 'appeal to emotion' is a fallacy. Anyone who's studied philosophy won't just blow it off because underlying all the logic is motive (emotion), it is our base driver and to deny the validity of emotion is to deny who and what we are as a species. Emotion has driven many great art works, many causes for science and much of the great things about our culture. No computer can compute without energy, it's emotional driver, they are co-dependent. It's such a shallow remark as much as the other fallacious 'fallacies' you mention. I used to use them too but I've since learned their faults.
Really? You replied to me. I didn't ask for you to convince me to be offended or find me a reason to be mad at people. I try to be fair and look at all sides and it just seems you're trying to get me to just see one side and as I just mentioned, you just blow away the emotional side yet your whole appeal seems rooted in emotion because the other side hurt your feelings so it seems.
With such scale to be harassed, she had such scale to harass. With much power to use comes much power to be used against. It's the nature of the world, that's what you should choose to get offended by, not by my words. She just as well used her might to speak detrimentally of others, which you don't mention, as some people do have legitimate complaints. And just because you write those people off as "virtue signalling", on that same token they could also write you off and see your complaints as just manufactured virtue signalling so you can get brownie points on your flavor of the week (anti)social media platform yet you don't and apparently you won't investigate their side, you just want to see your side because sometimes people just love to be angry and outraged, as you claim.
You can argue with me all you want but I can't take you seriously until you look into all sides equally and be fair. Maybe take your own advice about 'emotional fallacy' and ignore your feelings so you can look at it more objectively.
I have almost no interest in this myself but here I am, unfortunately. I'm usually just interested in the more meta of how these powers interact, not who's socially/morally wrong or right. Maybe that's why our arguments seem to be slipping past one another. I don't care who's wrong or right, because objectively you'd have to ultimately know the point of life so it's all just silly. Oh, but you want to get into philosophy and the relevance of subjectivity? Still, changes nothing about how these silly arguments will play out in the meta. In the end you still have to appeal to emotion using that lens but at least studying power interactions you don't wind up in these petty arguments as much and it's why I tend to avoid them.
This has now gotten to the point where you are claiming I have said things that are the exact opposite of what I actually advocated for or claimed, and have dreamed up entire arguments that actually are impossible for me to hold. Go back up and re-read where I did use the term "virtue signalling" and then try to square it away with how you think I used it here.
I can't imagine how this is possible unless you are actively trying to misunderstand everything I have said to the point that you are flat out lying about what I have expressed. I can't see how you can claim to be all about looking at things from multiple sides when you have so thoroughly fought against even the slightest attempt to understand anything I have said to such extremes. If I'm going to decry an example of virtue signalling, then this is it, as I am the victim of yours.
This is a petty argument of your own making. Clearly there are other things you should be studying to avoid them, like learning to listen to other people and not immediately fly off the handle if you feel challenged because you might find you were never being challenged in the first place.
I believe you are mistaking the people who participated in the boycotting, canceling, or whatever of Lindsay Ellis as extremists.
I believe they are mostly normal people. Maybe some are repeat offenders, and have previously bandwagoned on twitter. But I'm confident a great number of individuals involved had never done this before.
I don't think it is unfair to make most mistakes at least once. It can be hard to avoid, especially while growing up. And we never really stop making mistakes categorically, they mostly just occur in our inexperienced domains.
I believe a lot of participants were swept away by the feeling of doing good, schadenfreude, either a feeling of being part of something larger or an obliviousness to the scope of the situation, and by underdeveloped or underapplied critical thinking skills.
I don't think there was anything remarkably "extremist" about many of the participants. The common denominator is that they were active on twitter and believed their own posts would be a positive contribution.
I only spoke about extreme actions and was very clear about what the nature of the people and actions taken were. I don't doubt there were many impressionable useful idiots involved, these things often involve them, and no extremist movement happens without these kinds of people. But I never said all her detractors were extremists, I said she was a victim of extremism. Those are very different statements.
I was very clear about what kind of subset of people I was talking about—ones who act with a very specific purpose in disingenuous and hostile ways that do not line up with their purported beliefs. I was putting the onus and responsibility on the architects of the outrage, not all participants. If you think that refers to all people that participated in it, then only you can answer how the scope expanded to cover all participants instead of the subset of those that did things like create false charges, manipulate information, and stoke the fires all for the goal of creating a hostile environment for a single person they set their sights on. Of course many participants didn't know better, that's how it works. But they still did something very bad and, lest they think a targetted harassment campaign is a good method to reuse in the future, it should be called out for the extreme act that it is.
If intent is the only thing that should be considered and not the quality of the actions, we might as well say the exact same thing about the January 6 rioters. People don't just trip and fall into doing extreme things accidentally, and most people who do extreme things often believe they are justified, in the right, and not being extreme or unreasonable. And yet we, as a society, judge their actions along with their intent because actions are important and they are responsible for how they choose to act on their intentions. Just because it's fun to participate in outrage and go with the mob does not make it reasonable to do so—that's why all those "mob" terms carry derogatory connotations. It's not aspirational.
There's nothing about this situation in which the large-scale harassment campaign targetted against an individual over a pithy tweet, or a number of relatively benign and harmless statements, was a reasonable response. It is always an extreme act, just as engaging in "swatting" is an extreme thing to do even if you approach it as "it's just a prank bro". Just as it is a mark of shame to have ever identified as a Gamergater, it should be a mark of shame to participate in a targetted large-scale harassment campaign under the guise of moral purity.
Sure, its an act of extremism in macro.
But in micro, how many of the participants were fully aware of the scope of their actions? If three friends get mad at someone online for seemingly doing "bad things", are they extremists?
They might just be shortsighted, easily misled, perhaps quick to jump to conclusions.
My point is that this one incident should not be sufficient enough to cordon off this swath of individuals as extremists who should be excised. This might be a mistake they can learn from.
Sure, it should be a mark of shame. But it doesn't need to be a red letter. It's enough if they reflect on their actions and grow. I don't know how participants could make amends for putting someone through extended duress by their actions online. Apologizing would be a start, but l doubt some apologies from randos will amount to anything.
Maybe more than "whether it was an extreme action", will they remain "extremists" their whole lives? Will one action buck the statistical trend that doesn't include a possibly unwitting part in large-scale harassment?
Edit: real quick, because I forgot:
I don't understand what you are writing at the beginning, where you contest the scope I applied? You say something about clearly deliniminating your scope and I need to explain why I've approached your comment as regarding everyone involved as extremists? Sorry, this is not clear to me, as far as I can tell you are positing that everyone involved in an extremist action is thusly an extremist.
Nobody's keeping a list of names about this. I'm not calling out individuals to be blacklisted forever. I spoke in general terms about a type of group that always shows up, in different forms and from different directions, but always wearing the same cloak. There's no reason to take this as if I am calling for retribution against specific people and prevent them from having future growth opportunities over this specific situation.
In fact, my point was to get away from looking at it individually (by way of political tribalism originally, to be fair) and instead look at the entire way of thinking as poisoned so that people do not continue to accidentally fall for it, either on the pro- or anti- side of it, and no matter where on the spectrum it happens. It's a doomed prospect overall. I'm not speaking against individuals, I'm speaking against tolerance for such extreme behaviour from the root because that invariably leads to natural growth as people get taken in and swept up in the tidal wave, getting their hackles raised in the process, and turned into weaponry to be used against other people.
Okay, that all sounds awesome. You just want the act to be clearly identified as harmful and extreme to discourage people from engaging in such actions?
What I am still confused by is if you are implying it is the same group of people under every cloak. "A type of group that always shows up, in different forms and from different directions".
Either you mean the group that accumulates fills the same role, or the same type of individuals form a group. I think. And those are two different things.
I guess the later is still more agreeable than when I thought you were saying everyone involved is always an extremist, but it still suggests that any given person who participated can be identified apart from someone who didn't, as though they are a different type of person.
I already listed the things I think might be defining factors but I don't know if calling anyone with poor critical thinking skills a potential extremist or prone to extremism is fair?
Anyway, this is probably all moot as you just clarified you weren't intending to focus on the individual but rather what drives this abuse and how to prevent it.
To that I say, cultivate self awareness, cause and effect, and empathy? But at least some of these things are acquired developmentally and humans will naturally be at different stages of acquiring them.
Edit: oh, and tack on patience and humility. Both could go a long way I suspect.