Committed? The internet & our relationship to freedom

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As systems continue to fail and marginalise us, we live in the malaise of multiple forms of disinformation and non flexible, reactive and traumatised public discourse. Liberation, freedom and justice are so explicitly and often stated as the ultimate goals of our movements, yet as grassroots movements and leftist support gets coopted by and subsumed into the non profit industrial complex, political point scoring and general liberalism, our concepts and ideas get incorrectly associated with the punitive so-called ‘cancel culture’ of modern day liberal power, and a supposed draconian attitude to freedom (particularly freedom of speech).

For the far right, this discussion is used as an excuse to silence people talking about their oppression, so I know it is dangerous (and mostly futile) to legitimise it. My position is clear: you’re unlikely to find much strong or relevant critique of the left or those generally accused of having a cancellation agenda in even the best discussions about ‘cancel culture’, but there are still some things worth exploring*.

When we consider the realities of what a theoretical “good faith person who honestly believes in ‘cancel culture’ as a threat to freedom of speech” might argue, what misinformation they may have received and what they may have been exposed to, I find mostly a mixture of pernicious social media algorithms and the fact that the internet has a knowledge dissemination problem.

So-called ‘cancellation’ is people receiving prolonged public disagreement when they hold controversial opinions. This is also the definition of controversy, which in my opinion is a sufficient concept to explain what is happening. The only difference is that this controversy is mostly taking place on the internet, amongst what some would claim is an ‘unrepresentative dogmatic minority’. People who predominate the internet certainly are a minority, and it probably isn’t wrong to say they are unrepresentative. But the question of dogma is the important one that ‘cancel culture’ myth-makers distort in their attempt to discredit and belittle social justice advocates online. Thinking about it, it makes sense that increasing democratisation of knowledge on the internet, unrestricted access to all possible information in the world at the swipe of a finger, seems to have created small, highly educated, alert to misinformation sets of online communities that may initially seem dogmatic to uninitiated outsiders — but consistently a majority of these are correct and open minded, not wrong and dogmatic, and that’s what matters**. The problem is that when it comes to educating and debating with uninitiated outsiders on the internet, it’s not designed for this to be done successfully, and often doesn’t go well. We have a communication gap that is worsened by many other concurrent conditions. We also now live in a time where once our opinions, viewpoints and commitments to a cause are placed on the internet in the permanent ways that they often are (and therefore easily dredged back up), it’s shameful to go back on them in front of observers, because it makes us appear inauthentic and inconsistent.

Algorithms also don’t help matters: back in the 2010s there was social media ‘call out culture’ (a few popular leftists/movements on the internet talking about issues that the public were, at the time, mostly under-informed about). Over time as some of this content achieved lots of clicks and attention and the algorithms picked up on this, some aspects of certain leftist issues turned into very visible popular topics for everyone to weigh in on, making them vulnerable to malicious disinformation campaigns designed to fracture and discredit the left, information saturation, removal of context, and sometimes massively disproportionate controversies.

As for the elites, they certainly have a stake in ‘culture wars’ discourse and I’m less certain about their level of involvement in social media manipulation, though I’m sure it takes place. But what they are motivated by is money and power — and we know how they seek to maintain this.

Like most people, I do find myself worrying about the kinds of social media interactions where people’s inconsistencies are pointed out and someone is dismissed as morally, socially and politically tainted as a result. I believe that committing to things even when there’s a possibility of getting them wrong is a courageous and necessary step in order to make progress. People should be free to get things wrong and go on their own journeys (in other words, freedom of speech/thought). It’s a sad truth that the more I have gotten involved in political work, the more I have felt anxious about my own risk of being called out for hypocrisy or ignorance. In a political world so bound up with the internet, we need to overcome the internet’s debate and education issues. We need ways to temper the reflexive processes by which someone’s inconsistency often turns into assumed inauthenticity on social media.

We need ways to honour our commitments to ‘doing the right thing’ whilst balancing our human needs to sometimes change our minds, regroup, or disengage when necessary. We have to be able to move out of fight, flight or freeze into states of regulation and healing — meaning we can’t always engage and we have to let go of the excessive pressure around what we do and don’t say. After all, as people with less power in society, what we are so often denied is our autonomy, freedom and dignity, therefore we shouldn’t reinforce a coercive logic that denies us these things. Some caveats: Yes, for those most oppressed among us, struggling and resistance are our permanent states of being and therefore disengaging often isn’t a luxury we can participate in. For most of us, unless (and even if) we accept the status quo of neoliberalism, white supremacy etc, we will not escape the burden and weight of our marginalisation. Yes, any withdrawal also needs to be balanced with accountability, the need to ensure that there is adequate care factored in, not just dropping the responsibilities that one is holding. But perhaps it is a paradox, or perhaps it is about nuance and complexity — but I also believe that if we have no other conceivable choice but to always stay involved with a cause, we’ll always be unsure whether the participation is truly free and authentic.

Perhaps this throws light on the subjectivity of and need for careful thought about our relationships to freedom and authenticity. On the existence of times and circumstances where we don’t have the privilege of being able to factor authenticity into our decision making, and the need to be able to discern. Perhaps this calls into question the ability to always feel like we’re engaging freely and authentically in a world where many of our freedoms are effectively removed or constantly at threat. Perhaps this illuminates a requirement to think more critically about what freedoms we tend to focus on, other contexts where we already tacitly accept the limitation of our authenticity and how regularly this takes place without interrogation. Perhaps this requires a more rigorous commitment to stretching ourselves to embody freedoms in different ways that might be available to us, and extending that possibility to others.

I am committed to many things in my life, but my commitment to the sets of complex ideas and principles about something as elaborate as social progress is one that can feel treacherous. But we just need to keep pressing on and doing what we’re doing, and focusing on making the arguments, building communities and movements, and continuing to do the work that matters.

Some of the thinking about healing and liberation in this post is borrowed/learned from embodied justice practitioners and my team at Healing Justice Ldn, where we continue to have conversations about movements and the ways we need to reimagine and practice futures free from oppression.

*As much as these debates are problematic, I also don’t want to ignore that they’re popular. As much as we might not like it, when organising and forming coalitions with people in our communities, unfortunately the first roadblocks we likely will run into are the popular, tired, irritating debates. Rather than making the mistake of writing these kinds of conversations off and assuming I’ll never have to have them, I’m thinking through and considering my opinion so that I can respond confidently.

**as for cyberbullying, it’s a somewhat separate issue.