ok so yesterday i read jon ronson’s amazing book “so you’ve been publicly shamed”, and aside from being a great book with a lot of good insight on current internet callout culture, there was one specific part that i can’t stop thinking about.
it’s when he’s discussing one of the many cases of people who were publicly shamed he mentions through the book. the person in question is a woman who took a picture flipping off a monument to veterans and who then became the target of a massive harrassment campaign that got her fired as a result.
because the picture lives on on google, the woman is in constant fear of losing any future job she might get, or of meeting new people in general. so jon puts her in touch with a company that’s dedicated to cleaning up people’s reputations online. what they do is basically to create a vast amount of online content about that person, so that the news of whatever they did that haunts them is pushed back to page 2 of google results, which, of course, very few people actually look.
the thing is that, in order to create this content, they need information about her, and so they start asking her the most inane things she might be into - like cats, disney or pop music. and then jon hits you, the reader, with this:
“The sad thing was that [name] had incurred the Internet’s wrath because she was imprudent and playful and foolhardy and outspoken. And now here she was, working with Farukh to reduce herself to safe banalities - to cats and ice cream and Top 40 chart music. We were creating a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland.” (emphasis mine)
and this just… really hit a key point about this culture that i feel is rarely ever discussed. contrapoints briefly touched on it on her video about cancelling, when she talks about the contradiction between fans wanting creators to be “authentic” while also dragging them to hell for the slightest misstep, but she doesn’t really go in depth about it.
one video that does go in depth about it is pschyirl’s video on jenna marbles, “Why The End of Jenna Marbles Is The End of Authenticity”. it’s a great video that i highly recommend, and it basically points out how our current way of engaging with media disincourages creators to be remotely authentic, because authenticity requires being a human being, and part of being a human being is making mistakes.
and just… to me that just hits so deeply, and i think it goes way beyond social media platforms like youtube. there’s this contradictory demand that public figures “use their platforms” to raise awareness for important causes, while also holding the ones that frequently do to impossible standarts (jameela jamil immediately comes to mind). the safest way to be a public figure in 2020 is to be as silent as possible.
and this is often thought of as just a left problem, and don’t get me wrong, the “cancellation” aspect does tend to be left-wing leaning, but massive online mobs come from the right as well. and they also benefit from the essentialist discourse the left constantly clings to. in an essentialist world where creators are harshly judged as people by the media they make, it’s a lot easier, for example, to turn “cuties’s way of dealing with the sexualitization of children is not perfect and merrits critique” into “the director of cuties IS a literal pedophile”. the accusations are spearheaded by right wing people who are working on bad faith, but the essentialized version reaches the entire internet, and no one bothers to question it, and suddenly a female director who made a movie partially based on her own experiences growing up has to delete all her social media because of the harrassment she’s getting.
the message this sends to creators is to stay away from controversial subjects, even if those subjects happen to be relevant to you personally. it teaches artists to not take risks. and i can’t help but find it very, very sad.
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