🦷 🌾 🃏 🗡🚸

I’m referring to dredged up jokes from 10 years ago, when edgelord humor was at its peak, that has been accompanied by changed behavior; careless or outdated wording about sensitive topics; perspectives that needed to be unlearned.

My point is that everyone’s threshold for acceptable behavior is different; however, it seems that when someone does something wrong, the only acceptable recourse is to never have done the wrong thing in the first place. This is not sustainable. (Obviously people who are directly wronged by someone’s actions have a different relationship to the harm than, say, someone who found out about it trending on Twitter.

I saw someone in the notes say “This excludes celebrities,” which is also incredibly misguided. It’s mostly celebrities who are getting this treatment and it’s mostly celebrities who have the platform to show growth and change. You see articles about celebrities getting canceled, the behaviors that caused the cancelation, and the responses to said behavior and cancellation; you don’t (as often) see articles about your high school bully or your annoying coworker getting canceled, their public apologies, and their path to forgiveness.

And at the end of the day, if you simply don’t like a person, that’s fine, there are lots of people I don’t like and never will, with or without moral justification, and I, personally, am trying to lean into “without moral justification” because morality is being used as a competition. Who can critique an apology the best? Who can unpack all the layers of outrage and act the most indignant? Who can dig up the worst tweets from the longest time ago? Who can escalate the inciting incident to the highest extreme? 

Wayne Thiebaud “24th Street Intersection,” 1977