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Introduction: Do we have to do this?
This is such a tired topic, can we just not?
If you listen to people, “cancel culture” is either “not real,” or it is the biggest deal. Maybe you’re one of those people who acknowledges that it sucks, but still dismisses and downplays the harm it causes.
One person in my life went through all three of those stages in a short period of time—in fact, I’ve seen a few transformations that come at the hand of traumatic firsthand run-ins with online harassment. It’s easy to ignore, downplay, or dismiss something until it hits you in the face. Take Cassandra, for example.
Cassandra’s what you might call a social justice advocate, artist, and scholar. Early into our friendship, she said that she didn’t even believe cancel culture was real. She was like, “Isn’t ‘cancel culture’ just what conservatives call criticism?”
At the time I had a much broader online network with creators on YouTube, as well as with administrators of various groups on Discord and Facebook—so I knew a few people in the midst of ongoing harassment campaigns. So I said, “Let me tell you about my friend Josie.”
Josie was a lot like Cassandra in terms of interests, i.e. social justice and art, kind of what people back home would call a hipster. Josie also used to say cancel culture wasn’t real, that “call outs” are important to keep people accountable, etc. That all changed one night when, in a fight with her roommate, Josie threw a lamp across the room in a fit of black-out drunken rage. The lamp broke, and I’m sure the wall didn’t look too good either, but thankfully nobody was hurt—right?
When Josie came to consciousness with a pounding headache the next day, she did not remember what had happened. Her roommates made sure Josie would never forget. They say you should never be roommates with a friend because, if that relationship falls on hard times, it can get really bad. Now that’s another lesson Josie will never forget.
In some living situations or friendships, the roommates would have sat Josie down and had a serious talk about drinking less or anger management. Some friends would have just made a point of teasing her about it for a few weeks before letting it go. Others would have acted like, “Well, I better cut her a break because who knows—it could be me acting out next time.” With drinking, you never really know.
Being deeply committed to social justice, though, Josie’s friends went a different route. In an attempt “to hold Josie accountable,” not only did the former-friends not let it go, they held it against her for years. Not only did they hold it against her, they went public—they texted Josie’s friends, family, co-workers, and even later down the road, her new employers.
What were her friends telling people in these text messages and phone calls? “Josie is an abuser! She is violent, angry, and racist!” Racist? Yes, they threw that one in there too. Except it wasn’t the roommates who added “racist” to the litany—that one got added over time by others. What brought others into this situation? Especially for my readers who spend little time online, you might not know much about the notorious “call out post,” but it’s basically where someone makes a public post that accuses and judges a person with the intention of pressuring others in that person’s life to cut her off.
Only certain types of people get attracted to drama-mongering threads beneath definitive call out posts. Obviously the friends of the person who makes the call out get involved, but so do strangers or distant acquaintances who really don’t know the person. Different people who add to the “dog pile” often make vague accusations about racism, homophobia, ableism, or more specific attributes that aren’t even moral issues (e.g. “she is really annoying,” “she looks like a horse but racist,” “Josie dated so and so, who turned out to be a real asshole but she wouldn’t denounce him,” the list goes on.).
I did not just tell Cassandra about all this, I showed her. By request, Josie had sent me screenshots of the stuff these people were saying in public places or in private messages to employers, co-workers, friends, and family.
Cassandra’s reaction went from dismissal and ridicule to a sober acknowledgement that this kind of behavior has nothing to do with social justice, but instead exploits the popular rhetoric of justice for the sake of revenge, harassment, and in some of these peoples’ case nothing more than sadistic socialite gossip.
It’s no surprise people like Cassandra don’t take cancel culture concerns very seriously, considering the fact that Donald Trump Jr. wrote a book called “TRIGGERED” about how leftist social justice warriors are always caught up in this kind of cancel culture behavior. When the left won’t self-critique a concerning behavior, the right gets to monopolize on peoples’ valid concerns.
But cancel culture and these kinds of call outs are not just a “leftist” issue. It is actually just a socialite behavior. Google defines socialite as “a person who is well known in fashionable society and is fond of social activities and entertainment.” Because I also use the term “normie” though, I will use “socie” instead—a term used by mainstream types in the sixties. I used to think “normie” was just a term gamers or other very online people used to refer to people who were not in their subculture, but then I learned via the amazing documentary director David Hoffman that students in the sixties used three terms to classify one another: “normies,” “socies,” and “fringe.” The fringe kids were the intellectuals, rebels, and “shop kids,” meaning the ones who were failing academic classes and therefore were placed in the trade-school shop classes.
When I say the definitive call out post is socie behavior, that does not mean only socialites partake in cancel culture. Cancel culture is, like what gets called “rape culture,” not reducible to any specific action or instance so much as a general culture where certain behaviors, if they are not encouraged, nevertheless go unchecked.
During my drinking years, we liked to joke around and would have most likely been described as toxic by social justice moralizers today, but we were vehemently opposed to unsolicited groping, non-consensual touching, and we looked out for one another—especially our friends who had maybe had a few too many. In a sense we were anti rape culture before mainstream America started prioritizing such concerns. Now, though, some people think guys sitting with their legs spread out is a form of harassment (a microaggression) that participates in rape culture.
I don’t want to be like Shapiro, Rubin, or any of these guys who try to reduce all of feminism to this absurd kind of microaggression critique. They act like toxic behaviors are not a real issue actual (mostly) women have to deal with in public all the time. So, while it is true that I have firsthand witnessed a woman screaming at a man for the audacity of approaching her at the bar, or drama posts about how someone is a creep because he smiled at her, I definitely don’t think these instances are the norm.
Concerning rape culture, though, the norm is that when sorority girls go to big dance parties, there is an overriding expectation (and thus tremendous social pressure) to go along with a variety of unsolicited and non-consensual squeezes, gropings, and worse. Consider the Yale fraternity bros who had normalized saying to one another “No means yes, and yes means anal.” Shocking yet true, but that’s only one of many examples of how toxic the socie culture gets on campuses all around the states that can be found within the pages of American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus, by Lisa Wade.
To compare cancel culture with rape culture will undoubtedly warrant me ceaseless shit from the kinds of people who want to cherry pick quotes to use against me. There is obviously no one-to-one correlation between these two ways in which toxicity festers in a culture. However, what remains true between these two ways toxicity pervades certain spaces is that it is less about what any one individual actually does and is more about how harassment gets normalized to the point where, even if you disagree with it, nobody does anything.
When nobody does anything to stand up against harassment, eventually somebody gets hurt. People who have been hurt, and their “allies,” can sometimes get preemptively defensive. There is a strong case to be made that what gets called cancel culture is just the ugly side of a much-needed response to rape culture.
When I made this comparison to Cassandra, she at first agreed, though later raised issue with how this is a dangerous narrative that will ultimately let abusers “off the hook.” At the time, I merely agreed that this is a worthy concern. Later it hit me though: what about the people who harass others they don’t even know just because they have gotten on some hateful vengeance campaign? Are they not abusers? Do the narratives that downplay and dismiss cancel culture callouts not let these kinds of harassers “off the hook” as well? (Another question we have to put aside for now but should come back to later: What if “both sides” are the real problem and neither is virtuous, just, or a vehicle for real politics?)
It hit me that, beyond the fact that social justice socies are just too used to seeing right-wingers call every criticism they don’t like “cancel culture” as a way of evading critique, a profound imbalance in what gets perceived online ultimately shapes most people’s conception of the situation. Unless you have firsthand witnessed innocent people subjected to the definitive call out posts with subsequent harassment campaigns (death threats, doxxing forcing them to move, employers getting involved and firing someone, etc.), or unless you have been through it firsthand, then you just don’t know what you don’t know.
The profound imbalance of what gets made present to consciousness by media online lies in the fact that the call out is, by its very nature, a public-facing event. It tries to get everyone involved in writing someone else off, so it requires a lot of chatter. One cannot, therefore, spend much time online without seeing what appears to be pretty terrible people getting what they had coming. What most passive bystanders will not witness, though, is the fact that it usually goes on for years without ever ceasing and that this happens regardless of whether the person in question was innocent or guilty. It doesn’t even matter if the punishment far exceeds the alleged wrong. Without having personal relationships with people who have been canceled, you cannot know.
Innocence vs. Guilt of specific individuals is not, however, the point. It is the normalized atmosphere created by these takedowns that ultimately affords people with unjust or even vile intentions an opportunity to game the system. The ever-present possibility of social blackmail creeps in. “What are the odds that I could cancel this person and not have to deal with them anymore while simultaneously being hailed as a hero by people who will thank me?” is just one way opportunists take advantage of the normalization of call outs.
I said earlier that there is nothing particularly “leftist” about the call out, that it is more of a socie behavior in general. James Charles and Bestiality Boy are two examples, the first very well-known online whereas the latter has somehow flown under the radar (until now—I’m about to blow the lid off this story!).
James Charles is a beauty icon and online makeup instructor who, due to a notorious call out video and subsequent harassment campaign, lost two million subscribers. For anyone who has never seen the guy, he is a beautiful, young, and flamboyantly gay man whose claim to fame was making makeup tutorial videos on YouTube.
One of the things these kinds of “influencers” do to make a living is get endorsed by beauty product company sponsors. One of his “friends” at the time, a 36-year-old woman named Tati, had a product that he would use on occasion. At the age of 17, James made the mistake of using a beauty product that was not Tati’s brand. All hell broke loose.
Tati’s big “take down” video claimed that James, who she had allegedly mentored into the beauty industry, had betrayed her by using some other company’s vitamins. But that’s not all. No, she now felt compelled to let everyone know that James was a sexual abuser! Big if true, so what’s her proof? Apparently James liked to joke about how he turns straight boys gay. Screenshots of texts were even leaked, proving that James was hitting on a guy who said he was only a little bi curious.
Most people, at this point, would probably love to eye roll and move on. Who cares, right? Well, the people who still call James a rapist today certainly care. Post #metoo “believe women” or “believe victims” rhetoric culminated in a popular trans activist YouTuber claiming that we should believe Tati or else we are culpable for perpetuating rape culture.1 Beg to differ? Your opinion doesn’t matter to the thousands of angry teens whose holy crusade led them to do everything they could to ruin James’ life.
The kinds of people who downplay and dismiss this stuff will typically say James bounced right back after his cancelation—all it took was losing a couple million subscribers and making some apology videos before he started winning back the sorely missed popularity. “These things happen. Don’t be a public figure if you don’t want to deal with it.” Ok, sure, celebrities have always had to deal with this kind of drama—but what about Josie? The beginning of her harassment occurred during the same timeframe that James was canceled, and both of them have had to live with it ever since. Whereas you can argue that James has power and privilege, including a lot of money for lawyers, counseling, and a public relations advisor, obviously Josie does not.
For every person who maintains relationships with the kinds of people who participate in the call out bandwagon, there is always this fear that they might be next.
For everyone who is friends with such people, this ripples out. Call outs never focus on a limited set of specifics, but always rely on a “see what sticks” approach where a variety of vague accusations are woven into the narrative about the target object of vengeance.
The real paranoia does not come from seeing people who deserve to get knocked down a peg get theirs.
I. From “cancel culture isn’t real” to platform paranoia
Platform paranoia kicks in for anyone who realizes that the socies in their lives are more than likely collecting “ammunition” for possible future cancellations. After you’ve seen it happen, you’ll never unsee it: Someone who you know firsthand only met the target of harassment once in passing at a concert suddenly saying in the comment section, “I know that person in real life and let me tell you, I had a bad feeling about him from the outset.”
Consider, for example, Tati’s accusation that James likes to seduce straight boys and “turn them gay.” The popular trans activist referenced earlier said we should believe Tati and that it is never ok to try to seduce someone to change their sexual orientation (what?2). Ok, well, if it was really a big deal, then shouldn’t Tati have spoken up earlier? How convenient of her to wait until James started using a different brand of vitamins. What cancel culture does is it normalizes this kind of accusation-bundling and case-building.
Case-building and accusation-bundling are as old as society—I’ll get more into how modern technology and social media change the game in a bit. Law, and any system of justice capable of enforcing it, is, theoretically, supposed to help sort through valid vs. illegitimate accusations and evidence. Because our justice system is royally messed up, and it almost only ever stands to benefit the wealthy who can afford a quality team of lawyers, most people live their lives knowing any wrong they were subjected to will never see its day in court; understandably people try to take things into their own hands.
I am very sympathetic to the kinds of people who genuinely desire some form of justice after having been wronged. It’s just too bad that cancel culture undermines relationships everywhere while empowering the less than best sides of ourselves. We want a culture that fosters the better angels of our nature, not our worst tendencies.
Earlier I promised two examples of how cancel culture is not really a “left” issue so much as a socie thing. I said I’m going to blow the lid right off this one, well, here it goes.
Two years ago in Raytown, Missouri there was this guy everyone knew, the way people tend to know certain people in a small town. He was kind of a rebel and oddball who disappeared for a few years after high school, only to return with his own personal business, home, and a nice sports car. Let’s call him DFK.
DFK would drive around Raytown in his new flashy car, and my friend who lives there suspected DFK was selling drugs, then laundering that money through the business. One day DFK walked into a restaurant and pistol whipped3 his girlfriend right there in front of everyone before storming out. Everyone rushed to help her, but the harm had only just begun.
When DFK got home he went on his business’s Facebook page—which had hundreds of followers (everyone who is anyone in town). From there he posted a video of his girlfriend… sucking off a dog, and then taking it… doggie style, only literally. How did this sensational headline not make it to press—in at least The Inquirer! Well, probably because the kinds of people who live in Raytown saw it for what it was: An abusive ex taking advantage of social media and normative ethical sensibility.
Of course bestiality is disgusting and that poor gal needs help, but thanks to the fact that Raytown locals are not all idiots, they saw through this video. The immediate question on everyone’s minds was “why in the world would any woman, or anyone ever, agree to being filmed doing such a thing?”
Later it came out that DFK and his ex had been on quite the bender doing hard drugs. Whether they lost any and all moral sense by debasing themselves to the level of animality via hard drugs, which then led to the bestiality; or if perhaps it was for the sake of some blackmail pact between lovers, the Raytown takeaway from this whole event was that there is no way to punish or exclude her without empowering her abuser.
II. Entering The Vampire Castle
Long before opportunist media influencers came along to monopolize media responses to legitimate concerns about cancel culture, there was Mark Fisher’s article titled “Exiting The Vampire Castle.” He was, in a sense, a whistleblower. Like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, or Chelsea Manning, Fisher became a target of constant harassment for pointing out what everyone knew but kept quiet about.
There have always been socies who gatekeep and gossip in certain activist communities prior to Tumblr and Twitter, but organizers have usually found ways of discouraging or redirecting such energy towards more fruitful ends. However, sometime between 2014 and 2016, the socies were empowered with the rhetoric of social justice, and what now gets called cancel culture really made itself known online. Right before it caught national attention or was normalized by influencers like James Charles or Jeffree Star to everyone else, Mark Fisher was the canary in the coal mine.
Fisher was one of the early members of Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), what came to be known later as a cyberpunk accelerationist think tank. Besides his popular blog and relatively well-known book Capitalist Realism, Fisher was also very involved with intersectional labour organizing in Britain. In 2013, he published the controversial piece wherein he reports having kept silent for a long depressive period of (what I’m calling) platform paranoia.
Fisher spent months online observing toxic behavior flying under the banner of “social justice,” but he rarely said anything, even when he knew that certain toxic harassment campaigns were fundamentally unjust and ultimately counter to his goals as a leftist. “The reason I didn’t speak out on any of these incidents, I’m ashamed to say, was fear. The bullies were in another part of the playground. I didn’t want to attract their attention to me.”
And attract them he did. With the publication of “Exiting The Vampire Castle,” Fisher was subject to all of the forms of harassment one expects (and who knows how much he kept private, that never got out). In a sort of sense one can say his harassers got the better of him, because four years later, in another depressive period, Mark Fisher took his own life. So what does cancel culture have to do with vampires or castles?
I have firsthand witnessed influencers online downplay this piece and, besides the kinds of dismissals already referenced earlier, one particularly annoying response is to make a big deal about Fisher’s “vampire” metaphor. Rather than try to summarize the most important part of “Exiting The Vampire Castle,” we should let it speak for itself:
“The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have “identities” recognized by a bourgeois big Other.”4
Good continental-philosophy-based-thinker5 that he was, Fisher rarely defined his terms—instead developing the sense of his technical term through processes of characterization. The Castle goes undefined, but gets characterized as a way that the bourgeois order appropriates liberation movement energies via the fostering of certain desire-formations (the desire to excommunicate and condemn, the desire to be first to spot a mistake, and the desire to be part of the in-crowd). Each of these desire formations has its archetype in the form of the self-righteous priest, pedantic academic, and essentializing wannabe social-gatekeeper hipster.
I wish Fisher had expanded on desire, identity, and essentialism in an explicit and focused theoretical deconstruction of contemporary activist culture. Someone needs to do a deep dive into the history of poststructural leftist anti-essentialism—which has been for the most part abandoned by the academic wing of the democratic party’s appropriation of “cultural studies.” Such an analysis would also need to unveil the Deleuzeo-Guattarian theoretical underpinnings of Mark Fisher’s analysis for a wider audience. Maybe I’ll get to do it someday, but for the time being, it is time to apply timenergy critique and critical media theory to analyze the structural conditions ultimately responsible for fostering the toxic dynamics described by Fisher or any critic of what now gets called “cancel culture.” But first, a quick defense of the metaphor.
III. Why “vampires” are the perfect metaphor, actually
The image of a vampire is a little over the top, to be sure. I’ve been cautioned that stigmatizing a perceived “group” of people, or a whole mode of interaction online (i.e. call out culture) as something dangerous and vile, like vampires, is not exactly healthy. Nevertheless, I think timenergy critique will show why this particular metaphor is more than just intuitively sensible, it is also theoretically-based.6
Such nit-picking over word choice (“Isn’t it kind of problematic that he otherizes people as vampires in this article”) is just par for the course with people stuck in the mode institutionalized by the Vampire Castle. The fact that that is the point anyone wants to raise when Fisher is talking about something as serious as a culture where disagreement cannot “take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication” is kind of mind-blowing and probably a good indication that the critic in question has no sense for proportion or degree concerning when or how to apply their critical faculties, especially in the wake of his suicide. Instead of sobering up, his harassers cheered in public on Twitter on that fateful day.
With that said, though, maybe there could be better analogies for the kinds of behavior performed by call out culture warriors—ones that would not fall into unnecessary fear-mongering, otherization, or presumed projection of inner motives. Would it, for instance, have worked to call such people “lifestyle cops?” Or what about something else from fantasy like “zombie” or “werewolf?” I don’t think so.
Why vampire? Vampires are entities characterized by their immortality that comes at the expense of others. Marx famously compares capitalism to a vampire because capital extracts surplus labor power from workers who have a finite amount of timenergy to put towards meaningful projects.
Power, profit, and status of all forms are conditions necessary for being remembered after death, what Hannah Arendt calls immortality. Humans in a public are all equal before death, only able to establish a legacy and live beyond their death in the memories of the culture left behind. This form of immortality is achieved by winning recognition, in what Hegel called the life or death struggle between master and bondsman.
Under capitalism, the capitalist gains power, profit, or status at the expense of the exploited timenergy of workers. Likewise, there are those online who seek to seduce attention and extract timenergy for the enhancement of their own social capital7 at the expense of others who are perceived to have accumulated more.
Whereas Marx was concerned with the labor market’s systemic effect on the quality of life for workers, Fisher is concerned with the attention economy and how it encourages a certain mode of behavior that fosters a society of paranoia and betrayal. Anything you say might be used against you because this economy of attention is a zero sum game, and the stakes, or goalposts for measuring purity (who deserves a platform/attention), are always being moved (much like fashion).
A word that is perfectly acceptable today is ableist tomorrow, and if you disagree, then you are ableist. Who decided? Some self-proclaimed representative of “The Community.” While the goalpost-mover will say this is for the respect of a marginalized group, suspicions begin to rise regarding the motives of some who enforce such changes as goal-posts move with increased frequency.
Two years ago Angie Speaks started doing leftist video essays on YouTube. After a year of hand-wringing about how white “left tube” was prior to her arrival, Angie was widely welcomed—until she started saying things that did not tow the neoliberal identitarian line. She was doing some work with a larger YouTuber who goes by Peter Coffin who periodically gets dragged into drama (or does Peter stir it up on purpose to prove certain points about the attention economy? Nobody knows).
The first half of this chapter already went into “the tea” of other dramas and it’s killing me, so let’s please speed up this part of the analysis. It honestly doesn’t matter—people wanted Peter to denounce somebody he had worked with previously because they were supposedly an abuser. Anybody who tried to get to the bottom of that accusation was faced by a seven year long “he said, she said” between two people who are both self-proclaimed mentally ill and super marginalized. Peter didn’t want to use his large public platform to come down against someone.
So who cares? What does any of this have to do with anything? Believe it or not, because Angie had worked with Peter on a couple of occasions, suddenly she was getting direct messages on her social media from people threatening her with a cancellation if she would not denounce Peter… because Peter had not denounced… someone else. You can’t make this shit up.
Angie’s threshold for bullshit is historically noteworthy (her tolerance level for cartoon brained madness is like a North Dakota Winter—below zero!). After a couple of months of threats that eventually led to Angie’s computer being hacked, doxxing8, and death threats, she finally came out guns blazing to say she had had it and wasn’t going to take it anymore.
During the livestream when Angie finally came out with what had been going on, she got called out for being “ableist.” For anyone not familiar, ableism is a form of prejudice or discrimination based on ability—in the extreme form this means advocating for hard eugenics against the disabled or mentally ill, whereas in its less extreme versions people put those who are less-able down. There is a version of disability activism, though, that sees eugenics and bigotry in everything, especially the usage of words that function based on embodied metaphors. For instance, I’ve seen “I see” called out as ableist because this metaphor insinuates that there is something good about eyesight, which could be hurtful to hear if one is blind. Language activism is, in this sense, an endless regress.
Most of the people in my life are more or less ignorant of these niche shenanigans, so before going into what got Angie called ableist, a little context: At a young age, my conservative mother sat me down and gave me a serious talking to about the word “retarded.” She did not claim that this word causes actual violence and should therefore be expelled from my lexicon. Mom just told me that this word in particular hurts friends in this one family that would come over sometimes because their son has Down’s Syndrome. Hopefully most of you do not want to hurt other people unnecessarily, so this makes sense, right? Well, somewhere over the last decade “getting hurt” seems to have become a form of activism. Words like lame, weak, feeble, idiot, slow, and dumb are all also problematic now. While those ones at least make sense theoretically, now I’ve even been told to not say “stupid” or “lazy.” That’s where a certain kind of activism has gotten us today.
Now, what did Angie say that got her called out midstream? She described an experience as “triggering.” For my not very online readers, online people have tended to use “triggered” to describe the kind of person who makes a mountain out of a molehill and performs being offended or traumatized. Because the language of “triggers” comes from people who return from war with shell shock (what the DSM5 calls PTSD), certain individuals in various corners of the language-activism mode of disability activism have taken it upon themselves to purge this word from our lips unless it is being used in a strictly literal sense.
The absurdity of the situation with Angie was that she is an actual survivor of trauma, describing something she found to be traumatic, using the word “triggered” to do so—yet the person in chat, instead of bearing witness to all she had been going through, decided it would be a good time to call her out for saying something so ableist.
Understandably frustrated, Angie went off on this person, something her detractors never let anyone forget. Apparently, the only way to properly handle being called out, regardless of whether the person calling you out is full of shit or not, is to apologize and say you will do better. Thus Angie lost a good portion of her audience and her numbers of harassers increased.
At this point someone always says, “You just don’t think people in positions of power should be held accountable.”
The problem with the infamous call out is not the mere idea of holding someone accountable or of calling someone to conscience. People in positions of power should obviously be made accountable. Increased transparency, and legal institutions capable of making accountable, are anti-tyrannical prerogatives.
With that said, though, if you think someone with a few thousand subscribers has “power,” then I am concerned about your sense for proportion or priority. Worse, if your “activism” fosters a general atmosphere of paranoia to the point where most people fear ever saying anything disagreeable, much less in public, because so-called leftists might take them out of context or weaponize disagreements to ostracize, then problems arise when figuring out what counts as accountable, to whom one is accountable, and what level of power calls for what level of reaction given the alleged grievance.
We have to set these questions aside for the time being. Suffice it to say, we have far from figured out adequate ways of organizing or even networking online. It seems like we are in a dilemma where the punishment for perceived offenses often far outweighs the accusation in the first place. Thus alleged injustice leads to certain injustice. In a post-trust mass society where most people are skeptical about truth claims made by strangers, those who think they understand justice and accountability seem suspicious. Not only are these concepts ideologically contextual and complex, but they are used to mobilize people towards unjust ends all of the time. I suspect we don’t gain anything by giving “the public” (if such a thing exists on these platforms) the impression that we are judge, jury, and executioner. If we can, for the time being, at least agree that increased accountability and transparency are good anti-tyrannical measures, then we must also consider the ways in which abuses of this rhetoric occur. I think the first step is to focus our demands for accountability on those in actual power, the ruling class—and by this I do not mean celebrities or comedians.
Platform paranoia is bad for everyone, but it is worse for the left whose existence and well-being hinges on not being associated with Stalinism or Maoism. An atmosphere of fear and silencing, where people are afraid they might get disappeared (deplatformed) reifies the Cold War propaganda that has been internalized substantially deeper than anything we can practically do to prove it wrong by rational argument alone. Insofar as the left proves its negative stereotype true, its aims are undermined. Worse, everyone in the audience of Joe Rogan, Dave Chappelle, or James Charles learns firsthand by watching their icon get canceled that, even if they disagree with what was said, they nevertheless, by analogy, know that something they want to say would be subject to the same treatment.
IV. Timenergy Critique of the Attention Economy
They say that when dealing with matters of justice, accountability, and transparency at the societal or cultural level, we have to prioritize population-level effects over personal intent. So what if these demands for justice undermine their intent and, at a larger societal level, undermine the expressed intent? This brings us back to Mark Fisher’s essay, and questions of whether or not it can be seen as a net positive or not that there seems to be a virtual swarm of people on standby perpetually thirsty to extract time-energy and attention from others.
There indeed seems to be people who are eager to pounce and exact retribution in the form of abuse and harassment. These are rarely people who have a firsthand experience of the situation or training sufficient to handle allegations responsibly, nor are their behaviors precise or according to some agreed upon protocol. This isn’t democracy, this is a mob—or what Byung-Chul Han calls “the swarm.”9
We, the lowly rabble, used to have to leave our houses to throw rotten food and feces at people on platforms or in coliseums. Now we just feed the avalanche with hearts, retweets, and bad faith, hyperbolic, or ironically distanced comments. Maybe the individuals who participate in this spectacle are just the outliers of any given population who happened to have a bad day, or perhaps this form of abuse has become a fundamental aspect of their online identity. The virtual schoolyard bully.
As the suicides or otherwise ruined lives have stacked up over time, people with larger platforms who add to call out dog piles have learned to pre-empt their involvement by discouraging threats. Such disclaimers effectively say, “Let’s play judge and jury—just don’t anybody get too carried away by trying to act as executioner too.” That’s a great start, but the fact is the death, rape, and doxxing threats are practically inevitable when you endorse a moralizing call out thread to your huge following.
Never mind, there is nothing you or I can do to stop this behavior. If we were to try, how likely is it that we would fall into a similar mode? Rather than cancel the call outers or wokescold the wokescolds, I propose we accept that there are bullies everywhere and move on. Instead, let’s turn our critical analysis to the structural conditions fostering, or exacerbating,10 this behavior.
Let’s start with the idea that there are certain fundamental facts about what humans are like that can be cultivated or neglected by a culture that rewards certain behaviors over others; furthermore, certain incentive structures for or against different aspects of human potential can be institutionalized into law, or normalized by habitual practices. For example, capitalism rewards competitiveness for higher paid positions while punishing those who don’t play along with homelessness and an early death.
So, what are some fundamental facts about humans essential to the dynamics we see exacerbated online? I think the most profound fact to take as our point of departure is this thing theorists since Hegel have called “recognition.” According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (they’ve got a whole article on recognition11) this word carries both psychological and normative meanings that work together in most versions of recognition theory.
The psychological and normative dimensions hold each other together because in order for a human subject to develop a functional identity, there is a need for feedback from others—newborns die without affection, and the child who never gets feedback at all is what gets called “a feral child.” Without being initiated into language, the human is reduced to something less than animality—because even animals need care and perish if neglected.
Dehumanization does not only occur by neglect. Nazis and the Khmer Rouge ritualistically stripped “the Other” of their humanity by subjecting their victims to torture and starvation. In less extreme, though still no less real, conditions, a person raised to believe they are inferior to others will have difficulty adapting to the society that sees them as lesser.
On the one hand, every human subject has a basic psychological need to be recognized as an end in itself and for itself, meaning not just a tool for others, but instead as an autonomous subject with dignity and personal aims. Because this is a basic psychological need, the normative dimension of recognition says we are obliged to treat one another with basic consideration of their humanity—moreover, we should not dehumanize or strip others of their dignity.
So, while we need basic respect for our human dignity, we also need opportunities to try new things, discover our talents, build skills and relationships—all of the things I have spoken of throughout this book in terms of timenergy and structural stultification.
We also need to feel morally and intellectually OK—not bad or stupid. Whereas Nietzsche’s usage of “ressentiment”12 specifically interprets our need as one for intellectual or moral superiority on the cheap, I am, for our purposes, dispensing with “superiority” and sticking with “sense of OKness.” It just seems a harder and unnecessary sell to say everyone wants superiority on the cheap. Besides, I suspect most people really just want to feel not-bad and not-stupid, which is not the same as better and smarter than everyone else.
Given our current world order and structural conditions, how does this fundamental human need pan out online? What follows is my theoretical take on how ressentiment and recognition works within the attention economy. I’m laying this out in propositions because it will help keep it concise and make it easy for others to challenge, question, or add to any individual proposition. Disclaimer though: Unlike a strict logical syllogism, some of these propositions do not ride or die on others. I’m just trying to illustrate some key components of an overarching situation that produces systemic effects.
1. Humans fundamentally need recognition for healthy growth.
2. Potential for meaningful recognition is fundamentally undermined by capitalism, because it commodifies most social interactions and structurally constrains the relative time-energy necessary for personal, communal, or cultural enrichment.
A note on “time” in timenergy: for it to be of any value, it must be more than just energy spent within an abstract moment, but is instead invested over time by routine sacrifice—which means that it requires serious work when one might prefer to do something else. Consider how it undermines a relationship when a person only hangs out with you when they are bored, or gives you little gifts whenever they want something, only to then abandon you when you need them most.
A note on “energy” in timenergy: The “energy” in timenergy involves physical, social, creative, emotional, and intellectual kinds of energy. These all overlap and influence one another in positive or negative ways depending on the type of activity and psychological disposition of the specific person.
3. With the severe constraints on most people’s ability to give timenergy or attention in a sustained and routine manner to meaningful and non-commodified projects or relationships, the conditions necessary for healthy growth and attainment of personal, communal, and cultural enrichment and recognition are structurally impaired, if not absent altogether.
4. Without communities of critical recognition to grow up in (because parents, teachers, and most other peers are systemically distracted and busy), we develop attention dependency and deficiency complexes. More often than not, when we do have extra time, it’s time-without-energy (this will be important later); or it only comes in bursts too infrequent to maintain any project regimen that requires sustained effort (energy-without-time for repetition).
5. The internet, which functions as an attention economy, has stepped in to meet our lack through the commodification of attention. High tech methods for seducing our attention is big business. One aspect of “platform capitalism” that separates business now from before is that the most successful companies gain monopolies by making themselves the GROUND upon which human exchange occurs, for the sake of recording behaviors to sell to those who benefit from predicting human patterns (AKA “data”)
6. Thirsty for attention, and lacking genuine and sustained timenergy or recognition in our real lives, the internet offers nearly unlimited opportunities for spending either our passive attention or limited and sporadic bursts of energy.13
7. Instead of forming identities through sustained interaction with robust communities in the lived world, we are instead marketed brand identities online to fill the void.
8. Online, our attention functions as the base currency. Identity and its validation are cultivated in fandoms, or market demographics for particular products. (7 & 8 rely heavily on Peter Coffin’s terminology*)
Peter Coffin’s work on identity cultivation in online spaces informs a lot of the language I’m using. Check out their YouTube channel and book Custom Reality and You.14
9. The attention economy’s tendency is to produce parasocial relationships in place of recognition, which is to say one directional (pseudo) “relationships” through identification with brands/commodities instead of with people. Even when we think we have a sort of relationship with a person, say James Charles or Contrapoints, through our deepest level of identification (we have found someone who speaks to us at this level), they are fundamentally incapable of granting the kind of diverse and complicated recognition we require. (We cannot get fully into parasocial relationships now, but there is a fantastic series on this topic here.)
10. Ressentiment, the pathology arising out of our need for a feeling of intellectual or moral superiority (or just OKness even) is marketed to us. We are sold confirmation or validation, and we pay for it with attention first, and sometimes dollars later.
11. Intellectual or moral achievement requires effort or sacrifice, timenergy invested in sustained ways to overcome incredible obstacles. Ressentiment thus breeds media-commodities, the function of which is to produce the feeling of accomplishment and belonging with no real work required.
12. Because timenergy is undermined by capitalism (3 and 4), time-without-energy is spent consuming. Without a lot of money to consume, we go to the attention economy, because at least we have our passive attention to gamble for distraction and pseudo recognition.
13. Our sense of self-rightness and rational-correctness are not just the results of something typically attributed to entitled or inflated egos, but are instead produced through those exchanges of our attention for validation and identity. Moral and rational takes, sold cheap in exchange for attention, become brand identity to which we are loyal as hell (this allows us to draw a comparison between 4chan gamergaters or Tumblr fandomites with the most loyal and loudest sport-game-goers, though the former demographics are probably more isolated, and the latter are more drunk).
14. There are primarily two ways of gaining attention in the attention economy: Creating and coattail-riding. Creating may win social capital by extreme sacrifice of timenergy invested in the form of sustained effort towards the development of individual, communal, and cultural development. Coattail-riding is exactly what it sounds like, meaning you build social connections and cultural capital by participating in the hype raised by others.
This gives rise to the phenomenon of fandoms, which function by how people cultivate their identities and social connections on the basis of who/what they love or hate online. Loving vs. hating are the two extremes, often used in tandem, for cultivation of identity. Hating is most often the negative form of loving, which are the two sides of attention in the cultivation of identity through passive consumption within the attention economy.
15. If you are structurally impeded from developing yourself and partaking in meaningful forms of community and culture that grant real potential recognition, then you are rendered incapable of creating anything others will find inherently valuable and deserving of attention.
16. There are cheap ways of gaming the attention system. Some of these are fueled by resentment towards a society that has systemically rendered you incapable of becoming purposefully engaged in any way that could gain meaningful recognition.
17. Rather than aiming this resentment at the systems that produce systemic deficiencies of recognition, there is another avenue available: to turn a resentful gaze towards individuals.
18. If a particularly isolated or troubled person develops a pathological desire for attention and the need for vengeance, there are currently some easy and sure-fire ways to game the system for both.
19. One way to achieve a cheap sense of intellectual and moral superiority, OR the parasocial form of pseudo recognition (attention), is to put oneself to the task of framing individuals as undeserving of whatever attention they have amassed. There are ways of doing this that are not really problematic at all, and others that involve lying or misconstruing the truth to defame the targeted person. By riding on their coattails, or even better, by bringing them down, your personal estimation rises just a little, for a hot moment, because some people join your validation gang and you’re able to say you’re doing OK for yourself. Mind you, this doesn’t need to be conscious. Fundamental human needs find round-about ways of achieving satisfaction.
20. As Angie Speaks mentioned in her livestream, the rhetoric of social justice easily co-opts and feeds into this dynamic. Using the language of accountability while invoking a supposed community where there isn’t actually one, strangers and enemies are able to dog pile their targets under the guise of justice, accountability, and ethics. Whenever a thought leader, content creator, or celebrity is brought down, for whatever reason, there is a swarm of bad actors who present themselves for cheap gains of social capital, or displays of intellectual or moral superiority.
21. People on the sidelines, most people for that matter, who would prefer not to play police/PI/jury/judge, who are only really affiliated with others for the sake of entertainment, education, or potential recognition, are quick to jump on a bandwagon to expel someone from whatever community is invoked, because doing so means they get to be assumed as part of the in-crowd, the OK ones. Otherwise, they may just keep quiet and look the other way, because it’s too much to get involved with, or they don’t want to bring themselves any of the attention contained in the scarier demographics of the swarm.
22. While the loudest actors engaged in an ethically-guised clout battle dominate the spectacle, the social liability of maintaining associations with the target goes up exponentially. It’s so much easier to just write someone off, either loudly or with the click of a few buttons. Because, really, there are so many people vying for attention anyway, every one of us is replaceable, and no one is really worth sticking our necks out for—especially when there’s that lingering thought “what if what they’re saying is true, anyway? How could I know for sure?” To get to the bottom of the drama would require so much soul-sucking effort, so better to just move on. To get involved would cost precious time-energy, and nobody has it except for those whose desire structure is addicted to this kind of spectacle.
23. People’s desire to not get involved, or to not get dragged down by someone taking heat, feeds the false sense of power levied by harassment campaign leaders. They feel power because they’ve temporarily won the attention lottery. Meanwhile, the vast majority of humanity shakes their heads and carries on with capitalist realist IRL activities where these games carry virtually no power—except, of course, for in organizing spaces, where it trickles into the real world via perpetually online activists who reproduce these dynamics.
Unlike the amoral anti-SJW industry that cynically games resentment against people who care about social justice, the goal here is not to demonize individuals who are suffering from boredom, isolation, or mental illness—much less to promote those who couldn’t care less about justice (the reason I’ve left so many names out throughout this article).
With all that said, dropping hot takes in public places for cheap thrills and new followers is only the beginning. Most of us, insofar as we participate in online “spaces,” have partaken in this to some degree, purposefully or not. But when it has become truly pathological, it’s usually pretty obvious what’s going on. It’s heartbreaking to see hurting people treat the internet like it’s a place for forming community or getting therapy within the “spaces” of a hostile business that is only capable of simulating such experiences. (Moreover, the harder they try to make it into this thing it cannot be, the more it becomes a prison for us all.)
So at what point does the play become pathological? How do we know if someone’s behavior is going too far? A few red flags:
- They jump to conclusions with insufficient evidence and make demands of individuals that no individual should have to respond to when coming from strangers who may be acting in bad faith (and it’s hard to see hostile strangers and not suspect they act in bad faith).
- When a person is performing behavior indistinguishable from someone having an attention or power-seeking tantrum, or
- When the behavior is indistinguishable from a manic-depressive or psychotic spiral. (New rule for online interactions: If you can’t tell the difference, assume the worst and move on!)
- People who keep talking about “accountability” in the midst of harassment.
To that last point, accountability is important. Demanding accountability of a president as opposed to a fellow worker who has a Twitter account or YouTube channel used for self-expression without state or corporate institutional backing? These are very different things. Anyone who conflates these two things is sus.15
Accountability only has legitimate meaning in two contexts: A legal system, or close trust-based communities. Trust-based communities are not just online interest-demographics brands market themselves to. Trust-based communities usually meet face to face, have elders and children as well as families, and are places wherein most people have seen one another develop over time to the point whereby judgements (or at least a sense for the person) are formed of a person’s character by everyone involved. Legal institutions are developed when face to face trust-based relations break down in a technologically mass-society.
In the midst of a shit storm, framing the call out in terms of “accountability” and “doing the right thing” doesn’t help when there are obviously both strangers and people directly involved who want blood from the target of harassment. No subject of harassment can give the benefit of the doubt when the “shit storm” is throwing whatever it can to see what will stick. Whereas an apology and behavior change might be in order, the deafening thunder of the swarm drowns out any sense of nuance or concern for the humanity of the recipient, much less truth or justice.
Whereas a well-placed phone call or well-crafted email might cause any individual to step back, reflect, apologize, change behavior or do other forms of reparation, a harassment swarm campaign places its recipients in a double-bind. When there may be good actors on both sides of any such division, in this case the “those who defend me vs. those who want to finish me” dichotomy also contains some real baddies who are not in one’s own camp—meaning that, instead of concern for your well-being, they show that they only want you finished—and will do their utmost to enable harm towards that end.
This isn’t meant to be an outright denunciation of all actions that play into the dynamics outlined here. Just because some people benefit from social capital gains at other peoples’ expense is no reason to not call people out, on its own. But if we understand the dynamics at play, between how people are and how the system itself is rigged, then we have to think about new tactics or protocols for operating in sketchy spaces.
VI. What is to be done?
So, can nothing be done? The immediate response to anyone who brings up these dynamics online is, “So what are you saying, just let abusers do what they want?”
No one said that. We need to develop better methods for handling issues that arise. I got involved in a “left tube” working group that aimed to develop protocols for handling reports of abuse (as well as baseless accusations and harassment campaigns). Because Discord is a terrible website, and working with strangers is hard enough already, the sensitivity of this topic and certain fundamental disagreements tore the project apart after two-months of work that almost got published in a useful document. The big split occurred when some self-described “victims” claimed the language throughout the protocol document must be framed as “abuser vs victim” instead of “accused vs accuser.” Their claim was that the use of judgement-neutral language like “accuser vs accused” takes the side of abusers by default while protecting potential abusers. Innocent until proven guilty and due process were called bourgeois values. This proved an insurmountable divide between those who believe trust-based communities exist online and those who see how easy it is for bad-faith actors to infiltrate any well-meaning community.
Seeing that project collapse was when I gave up hope for internet-reform. Eventually I suspect there will be an online institution like the police that people can turn to for reporting guys like Shane Dawson (a famous YouTuber who almost everyone agrees was up to some super sketchy, inappropriate, and harmful behavior). In the meantime, there are no solutions ready-to-hand for those of us who have lived online long enough to see through what gets branded as “community.”
Complexity arises from the fact that these issues do not arise within communities, but from the virtual swarm. Giving in to some of these bad faith actors is like negotiating with terrorists. You are feeding their addiction to power flexes and attention stunts. To say they want blood, either in the case of capitalists or the nastier members of the swarm who exploit the rhetoric of social justice to hack cheap social capital gains (clout) or vengeance, should also be taken to mean they want timenergy and attention from creators, organizers, or parental figures.
Timenergy is literally the existential lifeblood of all human value, whether in the form of labor power or attention. It’s more valuable than all the gold in the world, because gold would have no value without the timenergy it calls forth in the form of labor. Social media has essentially constructed a system where we gamble attention for the scarce time-energy and attention of others, and some people have not only a severe addiction, but they also have an ideology to espouse that says they’re entitled to it. If some people use the rhetoric of social justice to game the system for time-energy and attention they aren’t actually entitled to, then the system in question, the castle itself, is the attention economy that encourages this risky gambling and entitled behavior.
I expect some push back from people who think this kind of analysis will empower the anti-SJW industry or the alternative influence networks online. All I can say is I wish those people (Shapiro, Rubin, Peterson, Weinstein, etc.) took human psychology and technology, and the way these interface on platforms, as their primary concern—rather than the incessant whining about social justice warriors being too hysterical.
In uncharted territory, we need to open up to new possibilities, not double-down on old ones. What are ways we can increase accountability and transparency without fostering a culture where it’s both easy and advantageous within “online communities” to exploit this rhetoric for cheap attention and time-energy from strangers?
Perhaps our only hope is that more people learn to work through their issues on phone calls or face to face, when possible. Maybe don’t disbelieve the hype, but at least take it with a healthy dose of skepticism and distance.
If you are in a dynamic that is toxic, just remember you have the right to walk away. You have the right to seek help, and you have the right to be left alone by harassers. Ultimately, you’re not accountable to people just because they tell you that you’re part of their community if you haven’t bought into it or if the rules of that community are not explicit and agreed upon.
Conclusion: What to do if you are a target of harassment?
I don’t want to close out this chapter without considering the fact that someone reading this right now might be the recipient of online harassment. What to do? I know that if you ask others who are very online, they will often tell you to address everything publicly. Yet, if you ask people who are not very online, they will tell you to not give these people the attention, drama, and spectacle they desire. Everything you say can and will be used against you, and nothing you say or do will ever be enough to satisfy these people.
You might go to the police, though this is not really an option unless you are rich—justice does not exist for the poor. However, official legal institutions may have non-profit resources to direct you towards. If you are not able to report through official channels, then get people you trust from the real world involved. If you don’t have people you trust in the real world, then you need to get out of your real world situation—no matter what that means. In my case, I ran away. In my opinion, when it comes to an IRL living situation where you cannot rely on others, there’s nothing more important than escape. Going online is not an escape. It is escapism.
One “rule” worth considering for any budding community is the one stated by Angie Speaks in one of the livestreams, “I can’t be a member of a community where it’s not ok to say ‘I don’t know, and I’m going to suspend judgement in this case.'”16 Let this boundary-setting statement operate as a litmus test to see whether the people you’re engaging with respect you as a human, or merely a standing-reserve of potential timenergy and attention to exploit.
Somewhere Hannah Arendt says17 people tend to resort to violence when they’ve lost or cannot build power. For her, violence is the technological extension of individual force of will over others. People who thought they built real power online are discovering it was all just a dream, a commodified simulacrum of social power that rarely pans out and is losing its force.
As people become desensitized to bullying, blackmail, and harassment tactics online, we can expect that they will only act out worse, going to greater and more irrational lengths in mad attempts to flex. They may cause some harm along the way, but it’s probably only really a passing and desperate moment as most others catch on (as a friend mentioned, similar to the satanic panic of the 80s and 90s).
At least we can hope. I also worry that this kind of behavior will just mount, get enshrined into law, and result in people being disappeared for real in the cyberpunk dystopian future. At least the cops in the woke gulag will use my pronouns, right? Or will the gulag instead be full of “SJWs” good and bad alike, because the resentment and reaction repressed and built up by people who see this online stuff eventually pivot and swing back in some reactionary direction?
We are in uncharted territory here. My best advice is to keep a foot in the real world and maintain relationships with people who are considered normies, because at the end of the day, they will be there to catch you no matter what.
Mature “normal people” don’t take this shit seriously. To be clear, I do not think IRL friends who spend a lot of time online count as IRL people. I mean friends or family who are primarily offline people. Such people know who you are and aren’t so easily seduced by easily sensationalized spins or cheap call outs. If you don’t have any mature normie friends who are relatively safe, keep searching. They’re out there. And keep your eyes on the goal, which is a future worth fighting for, where prioritization of people and planet over profit becomes the new norm.
1 Keeping with my rule to avoid calling out people in general, especially when they do not appear to be well, I will not be citing this.
2 What I will never understand is how a popular trans activist gets away with essentializing gender or sexuality like this. Nobody is “born straight” or “born hyper feminine,” we are subjectivized as this or that identity by a symbolic order and its norms and laws… If gay guys could not hit on straight guys, they would rarely get laid or find companionship and, moreover, a lot of “straight” guys would never learn that they might be a little bi or actually have deeply repressed their own homosexual desires. Obviously if someone says “Hey, I’m not interested, cut it out” then no means no, but no flirting—ever? Wow.
3 That’s just what it’s called when you smack someone upside the head with a pistol.
4 Fisher, Mark. “Exiting the Vampire Castle.” openDemocracy, November 24, 2013. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/.
5 Continental philosophy is the kind of philosophy, following after Kant and Hegel, that continues to philosophically deal with history, society, culture, power, and ideological frameworks—as opposed to “analytic philosophy,” which is the Anglo-Saxon logical approach that tends to focus on analyzing concepts in isolation from one another rather than structurally.
6 I say “based” in this way all the time. On the one hand, it means “the opposite of cringe” (Justin Murphy), so basically “cool.” However, I use this term only when its multiple meanings apply simultaneously: To be based also means having a basis in something more substantial. To be theoretically-based, then, means the opposite of theoretically-baseless and cringe.
7 Social capital is the “useful connections” you have in the social field. It is why people “network” to get “upward mobility.” Read up more on it in The Dangerous Maybe’s blog post “An American “Translation” of Bourdieu’s ‘The Forms of Capital’.”
8 Doxing or doxxing (both spellings get used online) means, according to Google, to “search for and publish private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the internet, typically with malicious intent.”
9 Han, Byung-Chul, and Erik Butler. 2017. In the swarm: digital prospects. http://site.ebrary.com/id/11370982
10 I really love this word “exacerbate” which, according to Google, means “make (a problem, bad situation, or negative feeling) worse.”
11 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/recognition/
12 I elaborated on this in a lot more depth in chapter five.
13 Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek
14 Coffin, Peter. Custom Reality and You, 2018.
15 “Sus” is just zoomer jargon from the game “Among Us,” and it means “suspect” or “suspicious” depending on context.
16 Online this is referred to as Angie’s Razor, which is riffing off of Occam’s Razor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xttrWefl_OE
17 I’m sorry, I really cannot find this reference but am pretty sure it’s from her. To be fair, Arendt rarely cites her references.
