Cancel Culture

I like to think of this place as an oasis from the rest of the internet's culture of printed expression. It's not much of an oasis from the internet's culture of pictorial expression, which everyone understands means porn. I'm obviously not saying that there's (much) porn to be found here, I'm just saying if all of a sudden you started seeing a lot of pictures displayed here, it would only be a matter of time before it's all MILFs and twinks and phlanges-in-slots. It's not that I'd necessarily want it to become that, but the internet has a gravity of its own. And just like astrophysical gravity, it tends to be drawn toward holes.

The obvious examples of verbal (spoken or typed) internet toxicity I hate to even mention lest I a) give them more publicity than they already deserve or b) accidentally direct one of you, my genteel and sheltered readership, toward a thing you had up until now blissfully, heroically and successfully avoided up until now. But honestly, what are the odds you haven't already heard of YouTube, am I right?

It used to be that you could dip your toe in it on Facebook, the long, rocky, spoiled coastline where everything on the internet washes up eventually, like a Coke Zero plastic bottle cap 9,000 miles from where it was sorted for recycling. Maybe you were able (like me!) to remain blissfully unaware of the hate groups (and governments!) using it to organize everything from potlucks to genocide, but none of us through at least 2016 were able to avoid the Racist Uncle trope entirely, the little cove of typed-out sewage we've all been invited to splash around in from time to time. It's probably true that social media creates bubbles of groupthink, but it also makes it nearly impossible to completely avoid trolling from the other side. Just to complete the metaphor, there's really no practical way to go wading into the sewer water without getting a little something. The best you can do is hope it's more like ringworm and less like cholera.

The exercise of arguing with your stupid fucking relatives can be instructive, though. As you would go back and forth, slinging bon-mots and links to supporting articles from websites neither of you would ever EVER go to,* the slow realization would have to eventually dawn that the point of the exercise is not, has never been and fundamentally could never be to convince the other person of anything. "You should believe A" is not much of an argument when the other person's position is "I already believe C" where B is impermeable buffer between them crafted out of pure, wish-fulfilling bullshit. The clues that you're not in an intellectually fruitful or even intellectually honest environment like, say, an Oxford Union debate are usually a) there's no third party to judge the value of anything you say, so it's a zero-sum clash of two people and their fixed non-idea ideas and b) neither of you is British. So what you learn from the exchange is very specifically that there is nothing to be learned from the exchange. No combination of words exist that is going to make Racist Uncle Jimbo go "hey, you know, I never thought about it that way. Maybe Obama isn't a Kenyan Marxist Islamic terrorist" any more than anything he says is going to make you believe Nancy Pelosi is a cannibal, or whatever else kind of dumb shit they think.

And the lesson is applicable to the wider internet. Every clickbait headline about how someone EVISCERATES or DESTROYS or ANNIHILATES someone else on some piddling point of pseudo-debate is a waste of the time it took to type it out. If you're not sure, just tell yourself that on some other TOO MUCH FONT SIZE website that slants in the other direction, the headlines are exactly the same, but just with the names swapped around to opposite sides of the bolded, capitalized verb.

The tragedy of the internet is that it's not the exchange of ideas it was envisioned to be. It's real estate. And real estate in any non-communist society is going to be staked out, divvied up and then defended unto death by the person who claimed it, usually with the largest gun (literal or metaphorical) s/he can get hold of, usually in defiance of state and local laws and (increasingly) most long-established social mores. It's not a highway, it's a series of backyard fallout shelters stitched together entirely out of broken glass, old nails and potholes. Attempt to travel along it if you like, but don't act all surprised when you end up in a ditch.

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*The fact that Dennis Prager believes it has never been positive proof of ANYTHING, Uncle Jimbo. Just stop.