Cancel culture is bad, actually

ok, have you watched oshi no ko? the LoveNow arc? what’s your reaction to the akane’s cyberbullying? seriously, if your answer is “this is so thought provoking, words that we didn’t think twice to say can leave deep scars on people”, you’re an angel. for the vast majority of people, you probably thought it’s so cheesy of them to try to lecture you, the story isn’t realistic, these people are comically evil so we need to kill them, or worst, “japanese internet sure is cruel unlike us here”. even with the knowledge that it’s literally based on a real story, you move on with your life with nothing changed.

it’s 11am and you finally get out of bed for your phone. you go on twitter as usual, you say hi to all the moots you love. and then. and then you see a clearly incorrect tweet, said in this annoying authoritative tone. you tighten your fist in anger. your cat meows at you because she’s starving and you told her “not now kitten, someone is wrong on the internet”. you stretch your hands and start formulating your quote post, eventually arriving in the most scathing post you can make. then you hit post and watch your beloved moots reaffirm your beliefs. this starts a war between your circle and the defenders. but you can’t give in, for you are the last bastion of sanity, the wokest leftist circle against the bad people. “twitter is terrible, i hate this place” you tweet out. (that tweet eventually leaves your target audience and spawns 2 independent discourses in its replies)

exaggeration aside, i meant it when i said “the vast majority of people”. nearly everyone is complicit in this behavior. you are the reason why someone else’s social media experience is awful. i mean, when is the last time you scrolled down to the comment section after you watched the video? how many tweets have you reposted checking if it’s correct? how many times have you hopped on a bandwagon to shit on someone just because your moots are also doing it?

the internet puts you in a tunnel vision where you’re the only one who’s correct and you’re the police who needs to fix the world. you never question anything because the enemies are racists \ transphobes \ pedos \ any bad thing, and there is no way {bad thing} can be right. conveniently ignoring that you never verify if anyone is actually a {bad thing}, or that your idea of {bad thing} might be misinformed.

the best example is probably the problematic media discourse. it’s a phase everyone goes through when they were 14, before realizing how weird those ideas are. a culture that centers around moral purity of a person based on what media they consume is indeed, not very progressive.

and i find it interesting that people would rather believe in the absurd than realize they’ve been lied to. if you tell someone a bad person is also transphobic, they would just believe you without doubt. you can just feed them more and more lies, no matter how absurd, they will get angrier and angrier to compensate, the image of that person gets more and more comically evil. cognitive dissonance is just that powerful.

my least favorite meme of all time is the “when the random e-celeb you dislike for just being dumb and annoying and unfunny finally is outed for a legitimate reason to dislike them” tweet. because that’s like an objective terrible thing to do. admission that you wish for more suffering in the world so you could justify hating someone who didn’t do any deserving until now. to anyone who has ever celebrated when someone got outed as a groomer, i wish you a very… live a happier life and realize your obsession with hating innocent people is unhealthy and the world would be better if there were less groomers.

i will inevitably sound like i’m up my own ass when i talk about how the crowd is stupid, but i am more upset at human nature than anything. i want to believe we’re inherently good or something. but even in my best efforts, social media brings out the worst in us. i still hurt people, trample on innocents without looking because i’m rushing to get somewhere, and my kindness have a limit before i lash out again.

so where’s the hope? what can we even do about this? i don’t know. i wouldn’t be here if i knew how to solve humanity.

if there’s anything i learned from cohost’s design (and mastodon’s reluctance to implement quote posts), it’s that social media design can only do so much. cohost was better mainly due to the culture attracted by the demographic and cumbersome design. #cohost meta was still consistently one of the worst places on the site, all the AI discourse was just terrible[^3].

however, i have personally reached the conclusion that we need to defund the police. take away the power from the authority who keep abusing it.

the angle becomes apparent when you think of it as a court of law, and frame this as a… guilty until proven innocent and retributive justice issue. a court that’s insanely bad at telling who’s actually a bad person, much less punish them appropriately. there is no justice, bad people get away with everything and good people get hurt. there is no nuance in discussions, no reason for anyone to change as a person.

i think people get upset when you point out cancel culture is bad because of the lack of a better alternative. who else would do anything about bigotry if not us? are we naive enough to believe this could work? and i really don’t know the answer is that. but i’ve seen enough innocent lives being harmed, how the internet turned me into an angry animal blindly attacking everything in sight. it’s just a naive hope of mine, but i wish for a world where we fight with the facts, not anger.