Garbage Collection for the Soul
In Computer Science, we have a technique for automatic memory management called garbage collection. In social media, we often refer to conflict between toxic people and a community as “the trash taking itself out”.
I find it amusing and appropriate that these two disparate ideas can have similar underlying terminology.
But the two might be more relatable than one might originally suspect.
Cancel and/or Call-out Culture
A lot of words have been written over the years decrying “cancel culture”. There’s some merit to be found in these opinion pieces, but it’s buried under a lot of stupid rhetoric and loaded language, so I won’t link to any pieces in particular. (You’re not missing much, I promise.)
If you’re not acquainted, Cancel Culture is a form of public shaming by calling attention to problematic behavior, often culminating in a boycott.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with what I just described, in a vacuum. I would argue that it’s even a good thing to hold people and companies accountable for their actions — even if those actions aren’t illegal, but still shitty to other people.
The problem arises when people self-partition their identities into one of two buckets and try to cancel the other one.
You see this a lot with political views, but even something as basic and indisputable as scientific fact yields such controversy:
Most of the critics of Cancel Culture I’ve seen over the years were from precisely the sort of person that’s likely to be on the receiving end of a Cancel, and their criticisms were predicated on self-preservation rather than any desire for a net-positive outcome.
Instead, I’d like to offer a simple, non-accusatory criticism of the whole ordeal:
When you have two teams playing pure offense, where their only incentive is to score points against the other team, you’ll end up with a high body count and nothing actually changes.
Ironically, the biggest shortcoming of a Cancel is that it doesn’t go far enough.
“This person was cancelled, that’s the end of the story.”
If you find yourself satisfied by that outcome (punishing a person and boycotting them forever, regardless of how they change or grow from their mistakes, like they don’t even exist), your social policy is only indistinguishable from murder by your cowardice.
Let the Trash Take Itself Out
You might argue, “But it’s not my responsibility to follow up on every shitty person who deserves a Cancel, it’s their responsibility to change and grow as a person and be better!”
…And that’s a valid argument. Well done.
But chances are, most of the people who will ever read this aren’t looking to earn a high score. If you have to call someone out (or outright cancel them) for their shitty behavior, it’s probably justified and a last resort.
There’s an enormous gulf of difference between, “That person is really harmful and I have to do this” and “I do this several times a day because it’s my social media brand.” When people levy criticisms of the latter against the former, they’re gas-lighting. Don’t tolerate that bullshit.
Sometimes people can’t grow. They don’t acknowledge their mistake (even if they pay lip-service to such acknowledgement). They believe they did nothing wrong. They dig their heels in (even if only privately).
Often times, people do grow. They acknowledge their mistake and spend time introspecting on why they chose harmful and problematic language or behavior. They seek to make amends to the people they’ve hurt, and to not repeat their mistakes.
This is where things get complicated.
Reformative Justice or Bust
I believe society will soon be forced to cope with the near-immutable digital footprint of our life’s most embarrassing moments and technology that enables the Streisand effect.
In many ways, we’ve struggled to adapt to it already. See also: lame hacks like the “Right to Be Forgotten” in the EU.
But that’s a band-aid, not a solution.
The solution is for us all to recognize that humans make mistakes — often, deeply regrettable mistakes — and we should emphasize learning and growing instead of a childish “punishment and reward” ethical system.
Learning is a messy process, but we all have to do it. The people who succeed in life are the ones who fail more, learn from failure, and iteratively fail better.
It may take several generations for humanity to develop the mindset we need to cope with technology whose onset is measured in months, not decades. The best we can hope for is to try to cultivate it within ourselves.
We have to grow and change by accepting that people can grow and change.
Otherwise, we’ll wind up in a depressing extremist hellscape where your only choices in life are to be absolutely perfect and never say or do anything problematic, or to be crushed by shame and guilt and driven to suicide.
We’re already halfway there with our criminal justice system in America: When blips on background checks bar you from employment, every sentence a court doles out is actually a life sentence to poverty.
So yes, by all means, call people out for their bullshit. But unless they’re supremely terrible and resistant to change, don’t discount people’s ability to become better than they once were.
Let the trash take itself out, but also let the garbage collector free up references that are no longer valid.
