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This reminds me of the injunction, variously attributed to either W. H. Auden or John Baldessari, that great art is "clear thinking about mixed feelings". Pursuit of balance between exactness and indeterminacy seems applicable here, too. When it comes to my own online presence, my aim is more and more to be very honest about what's abstract, silent about what's concrete. I'm sure many people here can sympathize with the desire to be taken seriously on this abstract level, that of speech and idea, with little or no regard for the concrete material — the flesh — out of which these things happen to arise.
Balancing the practical with the philosophical, especially with regards to privacy and freedom, is surprisingly tricky, though (at least in my experience). What I mean is that what's practical is oftentimes more doable or reasonable, but what's philosophical is oftentimes more admirable or noble. It's easy to unplug everything in your house and sit in the dark. Sometimes I want that. But sometimes I want to stand in the sun, too.
A troublesome desire wells up in some people to become primarily digital, especially when this would seem preferable to the misery of their material circumstance. This can lead to ruptures in the veil of transparent opacity — stress-pressure buckling and bending, making ripples. Over-sharing. The desire for self-destruction.
I'm inclined to agree that most targets of cancellation are of a particular social class which is highly public and most often associated with an ostensibly 'apolitical' field, e.g. pop-art or non-humanities academia. I think of cancel culture (whether it's even possible for us all to refer to the same thing) as a sort of massive spider perched above us in the air. The body of the thing, the bulk of its existence, is so high and out of view as to be of little day-to-day concern, but its many moving legs do affect what happens on the mortal level of us little nobodies. To make the metaphor even more unwieldy, for all the infighting we see amongst the wealthy and well-known, they seem relatively stable to me, whereas my ground community appears to be in constant flux, as though the legs of the spider were kicking everything up in a great abrasive whirl of misunderstanding, over and over again.
Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are all trash. My experience of Twitter in particular has soured drastically over the past month, only. I hope to leave them all behind me very soon.
I'm sure everything I've said is suitably opaquely transparent... :-)
be very honest about what's abstract, silent about what's concrete. I'm sure many people here can sympathize with the desire to be taken seriously on this abstract level, that of speech and idea, with little or no regard for the concrete material — the flesh — out of which these things happen to arise.
THAT is brilliantly stated.
I like the metaphor of the spider. You don't see the leg coming to kick you until it's almost too late, and all you did was share a different perspective with no malice intended. The spider definitely hovers above FB and Twitter and casual office conversations.
Opaquely transparent indeed. A glimpse of another mind, distilled to show the content, respecting the privacy of the person. Just what the Internet was meant for ;-)