Algorithms don’t run on empathy
Sometimes, I think that my thoughts on cancel culture as a Generation Z, student journalist will get lost in the sea of other voices who also talk about cancel culture. However, I also realize that as a person who has grown with cancel culture, my perspective is valuable in a sense.
As a middle schooler, I witnessed some of my favorite Youtube personalities get cancelled and now, as a young adult, I have witnessed the left’s cancelling of politicians in Washington, of Kanye West and of the entirety of men involved in the #MeToo movement. Detrimental? Yes. Necessary? In some cases. Like most issues in the world, cancel culture is a complex one. Everyone has a different opinion about it and most people, when spoken to about it, have an answer of “more empathy” and then turn around and boycott a brand; how distinctly human.
In Susannah Goldsbrough’s Cancel Culture: What is it and how did it begin? she differentiates cancel culture and call-out culture. Call-out culture, she denotes, is attacking what the person said and the issue surrounding it, not the person themselves. For example, if Kim Kardashian posts a photo of her photoshopped body, we can call-out that practice as promoting unrealistic standards for her millions of followers. Cancelling Kim for doing this would be extreme.
Extremity and empathy seem to be the Merriam-Webster’s words of the year, if it’s not an extreme measure, it doesn’t get clicks and if we’re not talking about acting with more empathy, we’re degenerates. But talking about acting with empathy and acting with empathy is where the disconnect seems to be apparent in extremity and I’m guilty of it as well. If we all acted with more empathy, then yes, the world would be a better place, but we don’t we act with more extremity and empathy is so difficult to measure.
Cancel culture thrives on social media because social media thrives on extremity, division and niche audience. Therefore, if we want cancel culture to go away and avoid situations like Aaron Calvin at the Des Moines Register, the algorithms have to change. But algorithms aren’t empathic, and algorithms build themselves, so how can we learn to live with it? For starters, we can learn to be consumers and not activators. The term, chronically online, refers to those people who spend so much of their time on screens that they can’t properly function in the real world. If we can work to get people back to reality and out of their hand-held computers, we can start talking about empathy, but empathy doesn’t exist in algorithms, yet.
Absence of empathy in the presence of everything is the detriment to the culture of cancelling we see today. Real people’s lives are ruined, although sometimes with necessity. The measure of that necessity is always undefined because the extremity will always win out in the Twitter argument. Some celebrities don’t help, some do. There is never any clear answer, the only thing that might help is moving in a different direction; one that sees screens as a tool and not a megaphone.