- This new state of affairs has been disorienting, and divided opinion, sometimes even within individuals. It has clearly been a chaotic process. Whether you think “cancel culture” is a good or bad thing overall, you can probably think of one example in which someone was justifiably punished through this process and at least one when someone was targeted unfairly.
But it’s a big mistake to blame this messiness on cultural norms. It’s not ideological; it’s material. Much like Socrates, we are grappling with a new set of tools. While attitudes always shift from generation to generation — we get stricter here, more lax there — it’s certainly not the case that mine has radically expanded the list of things that are considered unacceptable. It would be incredibly difficult to claim that our real world is significantly more just, less racist, and less abusive towards women than the world 10 years ago.
What has expanded — and expanded exponentially — is the amount of evidence every human action, good or bad, leaves behind. Almost everything we do “roams about everywhere,” as Socrates put it, forever. We produce a whole lot more writing, in other words, both of the type that can indicate guilt, and that can be used to publicly condemn the guilty.
I've learned to immediately discount anyone who uses the word "panopticon" in a sentence. It means that they looked up "surveillance" on Wikipedia or watched a Vox/TED/NowTHIS advertorial of Shoshanna Zuboff and decided they knew what they were talking about. Oh but we can dream, can't we Vincent? we can dream FUNDAMENTALLY Nobody on Twitter has any power, despite the fact that they're all liberal arts majors who somehow got the impression that Occupy Wall Street changed things. However, things can go "viral" which means maybe they can all retweet the video of a guy kicking his dog and before too long he's arrested for animal cruelty and he loses his job. YAY! A thousand impotent people can ruin the life of someone even more impotent than them! Hooray! But it rarely happens. Mostly you shout into the void thinking you can change something because there was that one time the hide yo kids guy made enough royalties to pay rent or some shit so let's keep shouting into the void and wondering why nothing ever changes. Let's sure as shit not think about the fact that the people you can't hurt love that you're piling on against people with even less power than you. "Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” Uhm.It would be downright hubristic to think for-profit social media could fix racism and patriarchy.
Now a majority of language is likely writing — and indeed, not just words but almost all of the movements of the human body have become writing in that Socratic sense