Cancel Culture / Purity Culture / Extremism / Gossip / Rumors / Our Brains Aren't Wired for It

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 "We used to go online to get an escape from the real world. Now we go outside to get an escape from the internet." 

It rings true. The pace of social media, technology has vastly outpaced our brain evolution's capacity to handle:

"More specifically, what if the reason social media seems to cause so many problems is that our brains just haven’t evolved to cope? That’s the contention of evolutionary anthropologist Dr Anna Machin, who believes that the convenience social media has brought to our our lives fundamentally misunderstands why humans have become the dominant species on Earth."

“You can contact 200 people at once. You don’t have to see them – you can tell them what you’re doing, they are in your life,” she said on stage at New Scientist Live, highlighting the appeal of Facebook. “The problem is relationships aren't supposed to be efficient. If we try and have efficient social relationships, the quality goes down, and the costs - particularly in relation to your physical and mental health - go up.” 

-Alan Martin - Techradar : "Have Our Brains Just Not Evolved for Social Media?"

Reddit 'lists' of 'problematic bands' in alt boards, rumors lingering around apps like Bluesky (which has a purity spiral issue), Twitlongers with rumors that should be handled by a legal apparatus; not a kangaroo court of wannabe pundits on social media, it isn't healthy or natural. 

Being someone who has found alt spaces to be "home," for a large extent of my adult life, things were very different before 2014. When there was a problem of someone being bigoted, scummy, not understanding boundaries, it was handled by security, or the community. 

The problem with using social media as a means of "calling out" a person, musician, business, is that lacks nuance. There are always 3 sides to every story:

  • Person 1's Perspective
  • Person 2's Persecutive
  • The Objective Truth Free of Bias
It would be irresponsible to allude to lack of nuance, without giving examples:

  • Maybe the person wearing Nordic jewelry really likes Vikings, it's a Pagan, or has Germanic ancestry.
  • Maybe the person claiming abuse happened just regretted a date with the person and is weaponizing gender bias. They may even be the abuser, but are capitalizing on the fact that in society, the masculine-presenting person is assumed to be the oppressor.
  • Maybe the band / musician had a bad political opinion, needs self-growth through meeting other people that have a different worldview / life experience that would naturally undermine their implicit bias (and a bunch of anon accounts fussing at them on social media will just annoy them and come across as self-righteous.
  • Maybe the person's 'offensive costume' / artistic expression was a way of coping with their own self-trauma (if it isn't for you, then move along). 
  • "Cultural Appropriation" No one OWNS a culture/aesthetic. Religion isn't real. Being a jackass over a 'white person' having dreads is about as dumb as chuds whining about the black Samurai in Assassin's Creed Shadows. Every style, textile, hairstyle, is derivative of another past culture. Advocate for ending discrimination and equity in workplaces, and destroying forced traditional values instead.
Alt spaces, in-person, before the era of highspeed internet/smartphones, really did have a social contract of "don't be a douchebag and use common sense." 

Another issue that happens all too often in this era, is the stubborn, unwilling, attitude, to recognize satire:

If an openly gay, Jewish, person wears a fascist uniform on stage, it's to disempower that ideology. It amazes me how obvious this is with J-Rock / Visual Kei, but American alt people assume the worst because it generates likes/clicks. Sometimes shock value is just advant garde and meant to make people think about social issues. But with TikTok and Twitter (or its many clone sites), discouraging people to think very hard, and anti-intellectualism being incentivized with the reward of social-capital (read my blog about Goths and Anti-Intellectualism), it's always the absolute worst, conclusion, no charity given, no context questioned, just 'cancelled' by the kangaroo court. Retweets/Likes/Video Essays.

This isn't healthy. And it's a death knell to art. Art is meant to challenge the social more, shock, provoke, sometimes. At the end of the day, it's what lies in someone's heart that matters. 

It takes emotional intelligence to realize that it doesn't matter what someone wears, or whether their art passes the purity spiral test. A bigot can, and many times does, pretend to be progressive. I've seen it many times, especially in alt spaces. Where a person is very loud with their progressive politics, they engage in callout/cancel culture; only to be found out that they're a sexpest or racist.

The internet / social media is a stupid tool. Meeting people in person is a totally different experience that this virtual box we're all engaged with. It's harder to cast aspersions about someone face-to-face. But like cowards do, with the tools of being digitally anonymous, from the safety of one's chair, they feel brave enough to slander people online.

It's not healthy for our brain chemistry, and it's crass, pathetic, and petty.