Social justice, callout culture, and their relationship to social media
May 8, 2017 1:43 PM   Subscribe

 
starts typing comment on how callout culture isn't a problem and doesn't exist

sits with fingers frozen over keyboard for ten minutes workshopping words that won't get them yelled at.
posted by Sebmojo at 2:16 PM on May 8, 2017 [79 favorites]


"Callout culture" is a thing, but I'm wary about discussing it as such because I think that almost always becomes inflammatory and "anti-SJW" pretty quick. There are a few visible contributing factors:

Self-righteousness can feel good or meaningful. A lot of young people who are still figuring themselves and their worlds out will get into activism as a way of seeking meaning. A lot of them will be privileged and end up in a position of continually moving goalposts and tilting at windmills as a way of obscuring their privilege from themselves. Real example: in the wake of the US election, there's been so much overt classism in the name of "not having a dialogue with bigots" (nevermind that exit polls don't support the narrative this relies on). More recently, there was a Heineken advert about having dialogues with bigots, and the response from a lot of the same people and spaces was, "But we need to have dialogues with bigots or else how will they learn." A lot of people don't care about social justice so much as making themselves look good and other people look bad.

A lot of the time in criticism and callouts, people confuse individuals being called out with the oppressive systems being called out. Real example: last year, someone I've respected a lot responded to a somewhat problematic blog post that made some rounds in certain circles. And she just absolutely tore the author apart as a human being. I actually lost a lot of respect for her, because there is a difference between constructively criticizing and using a real person as a prop to tear down for your own ego.

Where this gets a bit messier is that sometimes oppressed peoples need to vent, sometimes we/they get tired of dealing with the typical BS from more privileged people, sometimes people really are hardcore bigots and it is pointless to engage in dialogue with them. Protesting and no-platforming known bigot speakers is perfectly fine and certainly not any kind of overreach or suppression of free speech. Navigating all of this can be difficult, especially if you're still largely becoming as a person (I mean, we're all works in progress, but teenagers are mostly just lumps of unformed people-clay). Which is why I sort of hate how teenagers and college students are the go-to examples for discussing "social justice culture." They're mostly kids who are trying to do better than prior generations but they're young and life's messy. They will eff up. A lot. Past mistakes shouldn't necessarily be used against them, but at the same time it's not entirely a bad thing to hold people responsible for their actions. Some fudge factor for growing up is helpful, but sometimes even young people are just reprehensible monsters, and other young people imperfectly calling them out on it isn't the end of the world.

This gets frustrating because it really can be crazy making. There are a lot of bad actors who live for making judgement callouts on others' perceived weaknesses and moral failures. There are way too many people on any ideological "side" who're more than happy to stalk and dig up whatever embarrassing, hurtful records of another person's past that they can find out of simple spite. Less maliciously, there are often situations in which someone has made a mistake out of ignorance, and might respond positively to less hostile explanations for why their speech or behavior hurts. Sometimes their speech and behavior hurt too much for us to expect those affected to engage calmly and cordially. Other times people really are just bigots. Being human is a mess. I really would rather be a slug.

If the internet has a negative effect on young people, it's that we're all exposed to so much garbage so much faster, and projects like these questions get so tiresome to respond to. Yes, society likely is becoming more polarized. It's difficult in a society built on fundamental inequity to maintain equilibrium with people who support or shrug off that inequity. I would like to live in a quieter, slower, more cordial culture, but that simply isn't our past, present or likely futures.

It's become easier somehow to notice the negatives the internet brings - mass harassment campaigns, disinformation, reinforcing bigotries and petty grudges, simple human meanness - but there are still numerous positives. It gives a platform to minorities to talk with each other and the world, and respond to offensively misguided thinkpieces from people invested in maintaining the status quo. It gives us a platform to share art, culture and beauty, still. It's all as messy and conflicted as being human is.
posted by byanyothername at 2:18 PM on May 8, 2017 [122 favorites]


I don't love callout culture. But I also don't think that having to think extra hard before throwing an ethnic-themed party or voicing TERF-y opinions are gigantic problems. The polarization of debate and the threat of viral notoriety are gigantic problems, to which I won't pretend to know an easy solution. I think callout culture, to the extent that it is an actual problem and not a canard, is a result of a siege mentality, the constant pressures of the dominant voices of society.
posted by Countess Elena at 2:21 PM on May 8, 2017 [23 favorites]


or you could just stream of conscious ramble like me, and if someone wants to yell at my word-clouds, well, c'est la vie
posted by byanyothername at 2:21 PM on May 8, 2017


That's nicely put, byanothername. It's lazy to just put '-porn' after things that people like a bit too much, but there's a strong parallel - you can get a quick hit of social pack-animal satisfaction from joining in the group rage, then move on with your day. And while it might not be intrinsically bad, it's also not that intrinsically good.
posted by Sebmojo at 2:23 PM on May 8, 2017 [3 favorites]


I was pretty against it until all the fucking nazis showed up, that puts things into perspective pretty quick.
posted by Artw at 2:27 PM on May 8, 2017 [57 favorites]


The Atlantic also did similar pearl-clutching about students with PTSD and anxiety disorders requesting the accessibility tool of content warnings, so I'm pretty disinclined to trust the publication's stance on these sort of things.
posted by ShawnStruck at 2:33 PM on May 8, 2017 [30 favorites]


What byanothername said, basically.

Like a lot of useful concepts, e.g. "virtue signaling", you take a phenomenon that is a real problem, give it a name, and then let that name loose into the world... where it's immediately siezed upon by bad faith actors, misapplied intentionally, and just in general run into the ground to the point where it becomes not merely an empty or over-broad term but a shibboleth that indicates the person you're talking to -- unless you personally know otherwise -- is probably a Nazi.
posted by tobascodagama at 2:34 PM on May 8, 2017 [26 favorites]


In the past semester alone my campus has been papered over with fliers that:

-called for a "Muslim-free America"
-offered "Ethical courses" to Chinese people
-stated "Around blacks... never relax"

and those are the ones I've seen/heard of as someone who is not particularly plugged into campus happenings.

I'm against callout culture myself, but, like, please, tell me more about how terrible it is that you "can't" host a tequila party.
posted by perplexion at 2:35 PM on May 8, 2017 [62 favorites]


If you asked the students I work with to name the top problems that they see on campus, I would be surprised if "call-out culture" cracked the top 20. This just isn't something that I hear about on a day-to-day basis. I think this says more about the concerns of Conor Friedersdorf and his editors at the Atlantic than about the concerns of the typical college student.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 2:38 PM on May 8, 2017 [35 favorites]


I've been a university student both before and after the social media era. I did an undergraduate degree in computer science just as the web was becoming a thing (1995-2000) and just finished a law degree (2014-2017). Here are my answers to these questions:

When subjects of disagreement are discussed on your campus, what share of the conversations happen in mediums that almost anyone can access (like a campus newspaper, a public lecture, or a post on Twitter) and what percentage happen in relatively closed mediums like an invite-only Facebook group? Insofar as closed groups are operating, how big are they? How are they composed? What are the costs and benefits that they bring to a campus community?

The idea that a campus newspaper was ever a conversation is illusory. First of all, half of nobody read the campus newspaper even pre-social media and second of all, it's a one way monologue. My faculty has a newspaper now, and even though my best friends at school write for it and edit it, I still don't read it and neither does anyone else that I've ever noticed.

Conversations happened at meetings or face-to-face. Now they might also happen on Facebook. Most of the heavy conversation happens on large groups that are only nominally invite-only. My faculty's class of 2017 has ~300 members. The FB group for my faculty's class of 2017 has 571 members. The only people excluded from these groups are FB holdouts. They certainly attract a much broader conversation than any face-to-face meeting could have -- my faculty's largest room only holds about 350 people.

Today’s students are more likely than their predecessors to have what they do on campus exposed to the wider world, even when they’re not trying to draw mass attention to themselves (as in protests or college football). Publish a college newspaper article and you might find yourself trending on Twitter or on the front page of Reddit; break into the campus swimming pool and go skinny dipping—a frequent occurrence when I was at Pomona—and you may find a hi-res photo posted online; wear the wrong hat on Halloween and you might find yourself labeled a racist in a caption below a photo of your most ill-advised sartorial moment. The odds any one student will get Internet famous are still low. Still, how does the mere risk affect how students conduct themselves?

My current colleagues do less stupid things than my undergraduate ones did, but I attribute that more to them being slightly older and not to them being any more cautious because of the internet. Certainly they are capable of tying one on during pub night.

What viewpoints do you or those you know hold, but refrain from expressing for fear of being called out? What are the different ways a view deemed “problematic” might be criticized? What is it about certain responses that you find chilling?

I don't have any viewpoints I refrain from expressing for fear of being called out, though I do try not to say out loud whatever bullshit pops into my head. I feel more empowered now to call out sexist asshattery than I did 20 years ago and if anyone out there is not being a sexist asshat out loud because they fear being called out, well, that's fucking good.

Do you feel it’s hard to have campus friendships across ideological lines? Why or why not?

Well, one guy I called out for his sexist asshattery now only says hi to me in the hallways, and we don't really talk anymore. Does that count? Ideological lines aren't as clearly drawn in Canada as the US, though.

If nothing that you did at college would affect your job prospects, what would you do that you don’t do now, because you’re guarding against career setbacks?

I was not a wild partier during undergrad, and I am not a wild partier now. I don't post pictures of even my non-wild parties on non-friends-locked social media. But then, I also didn't do that before social media existed.

If all social media were somehow banned or magically banished from your college community, what would improve about the experience and what would get worse?

Well, I might pay more attention in class. Or I might find other things to read on the Internet.

I'd know about a lot fewer interesting things that were happening on campus. I'd have a lot more trouble borrowing notes, consulting colleagues about problematic points from our classes or figuring out how stupid administrative functions work at my school.

How often do you check some website or phone app dreading that someone will have said something hostile or negative or cutting or mocking or threatening?

Basically never. Though, when I post pictures of my niece and nephew and they get fewer than 50 likes, I get a little peeved.

What do you like and dislike most about the present communications environment on campus? Do you expect to like your post-collegiate community more or less in this respect? Why?

My pre-and-post university communications environment are very similar. I expect my post-university environment to be locked down, because in government jobs that require security clearance, they're not super-huge on posting work-related shit on FB.

I particularly enjoy the ease-of-use of FB and having instant access to nearly all of my colleagues for questions and answers.

For students who live on campus, what percentage of your communications with other people who live on campus happens on your phone versus in person?

I don't currently live on campus. I did for two of four years of my undergrad. At the time, most of my interaction with people other than my roommates was in class or in the computer lab. I had one friend in my program who also lived on campus and sometimes we would get together in her dorm room and code shit. I did attend dorm events, which was face-to-face contact with other campus dwellers. I never phoned anyone then, either.

I actually have a lot more face-to-face interactions now because I don't live on campus, which means I don't retreat to my dorm when I have blocks of time free. Instead, I spend it studying in the hallways of my faculty building, where I am constantly interrupted by classmates stopping to chat.

When you imagine bygone eras of campus life, whether the desktop computers and landlines known to the class of 2002, or the pre-computer era, do you look upon that technological landscape with envy, or would you hate it? Why?

I remember the computers and landlines era quite well thanks, I don't really need to imagine it. Life before Google seemed fine at the time, but life after Google is easier in a myriad of ways. Social media isn't as much of a sea change as Google was. During the course of my undergrad (1995 through 2000), the web got bigger and bigger and better and better.
posted by jacquilynne at 2:41 PM on May 8, 2017 [17 favorites]


offered "Ethical courses" to Chinese people

What is this I don't even ... oh, never mind

Anyway, someday I suppose I'll see a thinkpiece about this that doesn't conclude with an implicit "it's the children who are wrong," but today is not that day.
posted by Countess Elena at 2:44 PM on May 8, 2017 [8 favorites]


I remember the computers and landlines era quite well thanks, I don't really need to imagine it.

Ha, I remember university in 80s NZ, where the term 'politically correct' was born as a genuine and unironically good thing to aspire to then turned into a pejorative 17.8 seconds later.
posted by Sebmojo at 2:48 PM on May 8, 2017 [13 favorites]


I have started to feel like the problem with callout culture is not the idea of calling people out for doing dumb stuff that might impact other people. It's that everybody right now feels so helpless, especially young people. So what should be a legitimate "hey don't do this" mention becomes like 4000 reblogs on Tumblr with nasty tags, great, does that help anything? No. But what does help anything? I feel like we lack places to vent off all this energy, and so we end up going after the mildly bad over going after the really bad who we don't know how to deal with. Someone being wrong on the internet is a problem I know how to deal with.

I have realized that my friends can sit in Discord talking about social issues all day, but we're really all just feeling lost and scared and I'm trying to think gently about people who are also feeling lost and scared, even when they're annoying the crap out of me. The world wasn't like this when I was in college. It was all kinds of screwed up, but it wasn't screwed up in a way where I felt like there was a fair chance that people I know personally could die. A lot of my social group is queer, trans, disabled due to physical or mental heath issues, or some combination of those, and I can't tell people right now that they shouldn't be scared. And scared, helpless people are going to vent somehow. And people insist on making this about the venting instead of about the root problem where nobody feels like they can actually accomplish something to make this into a world that isn't going to be killing the people we care about in ten years.
posted by Sequence at 2:51 PM on May 8, 2017 [34 favorites]


what should be a legitimate "hey don't do this" mention becomes like 4000 reblogs on Tumblr with nasty tags, great, does that help anything? No. But what does help anything?

This is kind of a really great point about the amplifying power of the internet just being a real problem, not even through anyone's intentions, but just through the exponential power of sharing. Because fallout culture used to just be "telling people not to be a dick", and it would be confined to their actual social crowd. Now you have things that get tens and thousands of shares, far disproportionate to the actual offense or issue, and people start fighting proxy wars over it, and it all gets ugly. We have not adapted our social behavior to social media very well, and it's a real issue.
posted by corb at 2:55 PM on May 8, 2017 [30 favorites]


I graduated from college in 1998, and I'm so glad for it.

I'll add this: "callout culture" has absolutely destroyed the burlesque scene in New York City, and it's taking a pretty big bite out of standup, too.
posted by chinese_fashion at 2:58 PM on May 8, 2017 [13 favorites]


didn't people call this "trashing" in the seventies?

these articles are always so dismaying to me because there is some real worthwhile stuff to examine about ways in which people in left-y activist-y inflected social circles hurt each other and fuck shit up socially, and why that is, and what we could do differently. but an article like that would be written for a much smaller audience, from the perspective of someone on the inside. instead of being like "o look at those decadent youngsters and their rigid Morality"
posted by nixon's meatloaf at 3:05 PM on May 8, 2017 [11 favorites]


also i gotta say "callout culture" has been outstanding in one respect which is letting a lot of people know quickly about skeevy/shitty/take-advantagey people in social circles!
posted by nixon's meatloaf at 3:06 PM on May 8, 2017 [17 favorites]


Yes, there are legitimate issues with amplification, but that's not what this piece was about. This piece was about how Young Connor can no longer chide women, minorities, and other disprivleged groups over how their asserting their right to being treated as human infringes his free speech without people rightfully pointing out how that makes him a horrible person, and how that makes him sad in the feefees. To which the proper response is to tell Young Connor to get the fuck over himself, and if he doesn't want to be seen as a horrible person, perhaps he should try not being one.
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:08 PM on May 8, 2017 [40 favorites]


Oh man, I promise I'm not calling anyone out, but lol @ that first email writer...
One time, around Halloween, I read a piece that a friend posted about a Mexican Tequila-themed party that had happened at a small liberal arts school. A few members of the student government had attended and taken a picture wearing a sombrero. The entire school was so outraged that their student leadership had participated in cultural appropriation that they ridiculed them online and forced them to step down.

Now, reading this article was stressful for me because my roommates and I had planned a tequila-themed birthday party for a friend that same night. Admittedly, my school is less progressive and students tend to not get outraged at things like this as much as other schools, but I was concerned that someone would call us out for cultural appropriation, even though we didn’t call it a “Mexican” party or have sombreros there. We just wanted to drink margaritas and offered some chips and guac as snacks.
The entire problem was the "Mexican" branding and sombrero-wearing, not the drinking of tequila, which happens at almost every party on your campus on any given night without remark. It sounds like you understand this but are just being obtuse...
This made the party considerably more stressful for me.
Oh no, having to think about being considerate... how stressful...
I was constantly welcoming people and telling them we hoped we weren’t appropriating, and watching out for people who may have reacted badly to the theme. I was making sure that we didn’t play music in Spanish—for some reason I thought that would go over better and make us look less like we were appropriating.
You're not actually understanding, or caring, why anyone was upset... you seem to be more concerned with whether you "look" like you're appropriating than taking a moment to consider whether what you're doing passes the smell test.
Since then, we haven’t had any tequila-themed parties.
oh no
I also had always aspired to have a crawl, where each room was themed like a different part of the world (i.e. one room would be Russia and the people would drink white Russians, another room could have tequila and chips and salsa, etc.) but I never pushed that again for fear of being called out as an appropriator.
White Russians are not Russian in origin
Another anecdote was with regard to some research I did in Peru a few summers ago. I had received funding to work with a local nonprofit group and do research on educational programs. Although I personally did not feel like I was being very problematic by going down there, and personally thought about this a lot, I didn’t post pictures of myself with any of the kids for fear of coming across as white-girl-who-does-international-volunteering-trip-just-to-take-picture-with-poor-brown-children."
A good impulse!
posted by naju at 3:08 PM on May 8, 2017 [38 favorites]


I'll add this: "callout culture" has absolutely destroyed the burlesque scene in New York City, and it's taking a pretty big bite out of standup, too.

Yeah, I can see that it's definitely affecting standup. That said, it mostly seems to affect bad comics, but it's not like I am that plugged into the scene. I just know there are some hack recycling tired old jokes getting called out which seems OK to me.

But burlesque? Care to expand?
posted by GuyZero at 3:09 PM on May 8, 2017 [3 favorites]


I do try not to say out loud whatever bullshit pops into my head...
posted by jacquilynne


That's been the reason for membership here, and the attraction to this site as an internet learning gateway, to get that lesson down cold through (somewhat) gentle but ever-present reinforcement of the "don't speak without thinking" ethos.
posted by StickyCarpet at 3:10 PM on May 8, 2017 [7 favorites]


Ha, I remember university in 80s NZ, where the term 'politically correct' was born as a genuine and unironically good thing to aspire to then turned into a pejorative 17.8 seconds later.

I first heard it from Stanford students in 1989, and it seemed to be an ambiguous term even then, suspended between "admirable" and "pain in the ass".
posted by thelonius at 3:12 PM on May 8, 2017


Callout culture pre-empts a lot of real, deeper learning and understanding and replaces it with fear of public shaming. It means that you can't make honest mistakes on the way to a broader, deeper understanding of an issue that allows you to take it into your worldview and integrate it in a meaningful way.

I am not in support of racist frat parties, but I am decidedly against any social phenomenon that makes people conform out of fear - doing *anything* that stands out in a meaningful way invites public shaming and commentary, and I think it makes the world a more boring, sad place.

Here's my much, much lower-stakes example:

1) I wrote this post on my personal blog back in 2008: http://andiamnotlying.com/2008/hair-should-not-be-commentary/

2) Gawker picked it up and went nuts with it, milked it for several posts

3) This documentary shows the impact this had on the guy's life: http://gawker.com/5482848/the-williamsburg-hair-man-behind-the-blog

4) I really, really regret making hay out of someone's honest and innocent attempt to just be a little strange. All I wanted to do was write a goofy essay and it turned into this tonsorial with hunt that really fucked with that guy's life.

This wasn't even about anything around social justice, race, prejudice, anything more important than a cartoon of a dumb haircut. But all these people piled in to make this guy really hurt for sticking out, and it all came out of my stupid blog post.

Sure, it's great to be able to give marginalized people a voice. And I'm glad to have an enhanced understanding of what a lot of people think and feel that I never heard before.

But what if instead of a dumb haircut, some kid is just flirting with campus conservatism? Or, like me, they have an outmoded system of belief that comes from a relatively sheltered upbringing that will ultimately fall away once they test it against a suddenly wider world?

I dropped a lot of stupid racial beliefs in college that I thought were facts once I learned how to think about the bigger world - and in a few cases someone I cared about from a different background looked me in the eye and said "hey man, you're not a bad guy but that's not cool." I don't think that burning each other at the stake for the slightest misstep is a good development at all. It can make people cling to their beliefs - see vaccine deniers - and the point is to actually effect meaningful change.
posted by chinese_fashion at 3:19 PM on May 8, 2017 [67 favorites]


Yes, there are legitimate issues with amplification, but that's not what this piece was about.

Absolutely! But this is one of those cases where if we stuck to discussing TFA, we'd very quickly get to "well, looks like Connor Friedersdorf is being a jackass again" (around comment 10 or so -- 8 if you count an oblique reference to what was almost definitely another Friedersdorf article) and then just move on to something else. Which maybe would be best, but can you blame folks for trying to make a constructive discussion out of this nonsense?

I have started to feel like the problem with callout culture is not the idea of calling people out for doing dumb stuff that might impact other people. It's that everybody right now feels so helpless, especially young people. So what should be a legitimate "hey don't do this" mention becomes like 4000 reblogs on Tumblr with nasty tags, great, does that help anything? No. But what does help anything?

Yeah, sounds about right to me. The reward systems built into the big social networks encourage this kind of behaviour in really fucked up ways.
posted by tobascodagama at 3:21 PM on May 8, 2017 [17 favorites]


For what it's worth, I have had a couple of students tell me horror stories about embarrassing things going viral, but they have always been things related to alcohol and/or sex, not to being called out for social-justice-related reasons. It's possible that it's happening and they're embarrassed to tell me, but I think it's equally likely that it's just not something that happens a ton to students at my institution.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 3:24 PM on May 8, 2017 [3 favorites]


chinese_fashion: wish I could favorite your comment about a million times. Exactly! Shaming is puritanical--literally--and regressive. It actively discourages personal development and increases everyone's baseline survival stress/fear levels, which can cause all kinds of knock-on health and other kinds of personal problems.
posted by saulgoodman at 3:28 PM on May 8, 2017 [11 favorites]


Yeah, for the record, I posted this article not because omg some rando can't have a White Russian room (lol) but because I do have concerns with the way that discussion and discourse and learning on social media happens both for the social-justice-inclined and for those that need to be, well, taught to listen. I'll elaborate more when I'm not on my phone, but a large part of my college experience was defined by conversations on blogs and Facebook and groups and op-eds and all that and it was...enlightening but also sometimes disquieting.

I also wonder whether "conservatives that progressives should try to reach" (if you buy that) are people that think a lot more like the folks quoted in the article than whatever bigot the New York Times found in a bar today.
posted by R a c h e l at 3:37 PM on May 8, 2017 [5 favorites]


You know what also increases baseline stress levels? Constantly being reminded by society that you're a second class member by virtue of your race/gender/creed/disability/etc. Which is the point that always seems to get lost in these discussions. It's funny how we're quick to have concern for the people who are facing opprobrium for their conduct, but forget about the opprobrium the people calling out that conduct face.
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:40 PM on May 8, 2017 [57 favorites]


The Atlantic's culture reporting....is highly ignorable unless you really need to know what the pearl clutchers think.
posted by srboisvert at 3:42 PM on May 8, 2017 [3 favorites]


Or, as with a pretty recent incident at my own university: a fucking border patrol themed party.

That frat house got vandalized with "rapists" and "racists", just a few weeks ago. I'm against that. But jesus christ.
posted by perplexion at 3:47 PM on May 8, 2017 [11 favorites]


I wrote this post on my personal blog back in 2008...Gawker picked it up and went nuts with it, milked it for several posts..."
posted by tobascodagama


Oh, so you're the one. Haircut Hipster is a good friend of mine. And yes, despite being an extrovert at home in the spotlight, he was set back by that whole debacle.

I guess he survived, though. He sports an even dumber haircut now, and he got the girl. My niece. Batting way out of his league.
posted by StickyCarpet at 3:49 PM on May 8, 2017 [27 favorites]


Or, as with a pretty recent incident at my own university: a fucking border patrol themed party.

jfc. I just changed my mind, I think callout culture is a fantastic and necessary service for everyone.
posted by naju at 3:54 PM on May 8, 2017 [34 favorites]


I can't tell if half the people in this thread work at the same University as me or if our problems with racist frats are all that similar.
posted by tofu_crouton at 4:07 PM on May 8, 2017 [5 favorites]


I was just reading an article on Psychology Today interviewing a certain famous activist, and what's an interesting lens is there are deep interpersonal divisions in terms of what's the right way to do things, that seems to come out of differences in worldviews, personal (meaning, childhood) experience, political contexts, values systems and implicit philosophies, etc. It may not be clear how to reconcile conflict at all these levels, but for psychologists and therapists this is why examples like this callout culture (and varying perceptions about it) is something that could be looked at in terms of social psychology.

Which also reminds me, as Noam Chomsky says—all strategies have half-lives. It's not just that methods have diminishing returns; it's also a way out for anybody who's activist-minded: sometimes change also requires changing how you think about change.
posted by polymodus at 4:20 PM on May 8, 2017 [7 favorites]


Shaming is puritanical--literally--and regressive. It actively discourages personal development and increases everyone's baseline survival stress/fear levels, which can cause all kinds of knock-on health and other kinds of personal problems.

Is shaming always puritanical and regressive, though? "Shaming" is what we do when we collectively frown upon certain behaviors deemed socially unacceptable, and attempt to register disapproval/disappointment with the people who commit them. These behaviors might not be strictly illegal, but they are not conducive to a civil society, so we work to discourage them. In some cases this DOES end up being puritanical and regressive, because the impulse behind the shaming is a function of a puritanical, regressive society - fatshaming and slutshaming come to mind. But in other cases, shaming can be progressive. Your friend group disapproving of one of your friends making a tasteless, offensive gay joke is "social correction" in action and serves to realign your friend group's values to be more LGBT-friendly. We can also do the same for our college, or society at large, in order to align the student body's values, or everyone in your town, or America in general, in a way that reflects our ideals.

I really question the idea that this daily, near-subliminal process of culture-shaping (to be more inclusive and welcoming) that we do every day just by participating in events and talking to people, is going to lead to loads of people suffering physical ailments and, idk, erectile dysfunction and ulcers, sounds like, because they are so stressed out that they can no longer say or do hurtful things and have everyone laugh and pat them on the back.
posted by naju at 4:29 PM on May 8, 2017 [22 favorites]


Seems like the Hypatia conflagration is the subtext of this conversation in my networks.
posted by spitbull at 4:33 PM on May 8, 2017 [3 favorites]


My experience of call-out culture has been in fandom, where oftentimes the people getting called out are marginalized people themselves. It's a seriously toxic eating-their-own dynamic. I'm so annoyed that the alt-right has hijacked "SJW" because it was actually a useful term in fandom.
posted by airmail at 4:33 PM on May 8, 2017 [12 favorites]


So I worked on the campus newspaper, and did a couple of projects that involved a deep dive into the newspaper archives, and let me tell you, campuses have ALWAYS been hotbeds of "callout culture" where students freak out over every tiny thing and tempests live in teapots. Because they are college students. We encourage them to live a cloistered life (I mean literally modeled after monasteries so they can be separated from the outside world) where their whole life revolves around and is shielded within the university, which we call a community, or even a family, and then we're shocked when they're strongly emotionally reactive to trivia within that "family"? That is like pretty much literally what a family is. And you can look at medieval universities, you can look at monasteries from basically 300 to the present, and the same dynamics occur.

Anyway, I can think of some controversies from my college career that were good fights (racial inclusion, LGBT issues) and some that were seriously stupid-ass trivia (bacon bits on the salad bar on Fridays in Lent, FOUR YEARS OF THAT; whether sprinkler schedules were suppressing free speech; the existence of the swim test; whether it was okay to do boxing for charity; whether this or that professor or trustee was too offensive to exist ...) and some that were legitimately intense internal debates with no application to the wider world (parietals*, co-ed dorms). And alums would come and complain that we were fighting about salad bar bacon or parietals or whatever, because they were protesting Vietnam in the 60s and 70s. But you know what else they were protesting for months on end, according to the newspaper archives? Lenten Friday menus, parietals, single-sex education, admitting women, not admitting women, whether the library was locked too early, if certain professors were too offensive to exist, the vernacular Mass, the Latin Mass, Mass attendance requirements, undergrad curriculum requirements ... you name it, they protested it. It's just that they REMEMBER protesting Vietnam and they've forgotten when there was a four-month controversy with multiple protests over (true story!) whether a cat could run for student body president.

Anyway, the campus dramas over being "PC" or about "call-out culture" I see today are not really any different than those when I was in college, or when my parents were. The major difference is really the ability for them to go viral, and national, and the speed at which they occur, and the difficulty of full-grown adults intervening before they spiral out of control. People for sure got named and shamed during campus dramas in the 60s and the 90s (and, hey, even during the 1560s when you could nail your name-and-shame to the church door!), but you're on a campus of 7,000 people with a local campus newspaper; the naming and shaming doesn't go beyond campus boundaries except in very, very rare situations. And the drama takes a while to build, which gives people a chance to think twice and opt out, and campus authorities (for good or ill) have a lot more control over the discourse simply because they control the physical space. My big concern about college students today with social media is not callout culture per se -- that's always been there -- but the speed and size and rapid transmission of the callouts, and the naming-and-shaming. That's the part that's potentially life-ruining. 19-year-old kids should be able to have a vicious five-month intra-community smackdown over sombreros and tequila at parties without their names being googleable about it forever.

Personal story, I went to a campus that was 85% republican (and I have ZERO SYMPATHY for the guy who whines about being as rare as an albino snapping turtle on campus because, dude, pick a different fucking campus; and also, on an 85% GOP campus we still had the SAME FUCKIN' CONSERVATIVE WHINERS who considered all disagreement with them oppression but I digress). We had a columnist for the newspaper who was a vicious, vile anti-gay bigot and a wild Randian conservative who wrote super-offensive columns every week and I was ALWAYS working the day after they ran so I got to field all his phone calls and I loathed him with the fire of a thousand suns both because his opinions were personally offensive to me and because I was his pooper scooper responsible for all the consequences of the turds he dropped into the campus discourse. (You can imagine him, Scalia was his hero.) ANYWAY, some 20 years later my husband is talking about a colleague at work at the name sounds familiar but I can't place it, and some two hours later it comes to me and I sit bolt upright and I'm like, "THAT GUY WAS MY COLLEGE NEMESIS." We looked him up online and, indeed!, it was him! But in the intervening 20 years he's become a Democrat and is one of the top fundraisers for the state party, a high-level functionary for the party, a government official for the Dem governor, and a major force behind LGBT equality measures in our state. I have no idea what happened there (well, I have a few guesses), and I'd love to have a beer with him one day and find out. But a few months later someone from a rival Democratic camp noted that I'd gone to college with him and they were compiling an oppo file on him and wanted to know if I had oppo on him. I DO, I HAVE LOTS OF IT, because his college newspaper columns railing about the evils of the buttsex have not been digitized yet, but I have bound books of the papers from those years. And briefly I wanted to give it to them because I would not have pissed on him if he were on fire in college. But you know what? Here's a man who held super-vile opinions in college who not too long thereafter repented of them, did a complete 180, and has spent 20 years raising money and awareness and being really effective at getting laws passed to protect the people he used to rail against. It'd be a super-shitty thing to destroy his career, and undermine all the work he's done and continues to do, over the fact that he was an asshole when he was 20. Like, I feel like in his case, college worked! And some day they will probably finish digitizing those years of the campus paper and maybe his career will be destroyed then, but it won't be by me. I won't have any part of that. And that's the part of this whole thing I feel really bad about for college kids of today -- how many will have a chance to atone for what assholes they were at 20, when their campus errors follow them forever?

*For those of you who didn't go to Catholic colleges with single-sex dorms, parietals, from the Latin "wall," are rules governing the visits of members of the opposite sex to single-sex dorms. Such as, no boys in the girls' dorms before 9 a.m. or after midnight on weeknights, 2 a.m. on weekends, and vice versa.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 4:35 PM on May 8, 2017 [122 favorites]


If you asked the students I work with to name the top problems that they see on campus, I would be surprised if "call-out culture" cracked the top 20.

I haven't been in college for a million years, but I bet the campus matters. It sounds like the author heard mostly from students at small liberal arts schools (or small religious colleges). SLACs for sure are very much "tempest in a teapot" environments and I shudder to think what my own SLAC experience would have been like with social media.

I agree that part of this is just what happens when people who are oppressed in some way have venues for saying things that will make privileged people uncomfortable. But I have two problems with call-out culture as I've seen it among activists/progressives/leftists in online spaces:

- No WAY is it just the most marginalized people doing the calling out. Actually, to make a sweeping generalization, the worst examples I've seen of white people being called out have ALWAYS been other white people. To the point where it often does feel really performative and stemming from white guilt.

- Also no WAY is it the most effective way to change someone's attitudes or behavior for the better. And this is especially concerning to me when we're talking about one privileged person publicly calling out or piling onto another person who shares that privilege. I mean, I would understand if, say, a black woman was like "you know what? I'm tired of patiently reminding white feminists to take women of color seriously." But for me, as a white woman who has not spent my whole life doing that? I owe it to the world to try to engage the white person who said the fucked up thing, especially if it's someone I actually know. That might not make a difference either, but it's way more likely to make a difference than tweeting something snide at them.

I do think call-out culture is a serious problem in some circles. And I think it's quite separate from spurious wankery about "SJW"s or whatever. I do actually think it's gotten better over the past few years in the circles I've traveled in, mostly as a result of people of color saying, "hey, white people, I know you think you're helping with this, but you're not - we need you to actually do the work of engaging with other white people."
posted by lunasol at 4:36 PM on May 8, 2017 [19 favorites]


There's a really nasty ongoing conflict on my campus between the conservatives and the left-leaning types, and on pretty much everything I think the conservatives are being assholes.

OK wait, except it's not the conservatives on the whole, it's the College Republicans. They're being assholes. They're deliberately inviting provocative speakers to prove a point, and when there's inevitably backlash, they turn around and claim to be victims, that conservatives are the most victimized group on campus, and oh cry me a river.

OK, but to be honest, I don't know what the majority of conservative students are doing, except that there's probably more conservatives on campus than there are College Republicans, and there are a lot of people who have been saying they feel physically unsafe sometimes, especially since the past year, where there's been some assaults against self-professed conservatives. And I've been noticing the way I've reacted to those assaults. Last year someone claimed that he got "sucker punched" out of nowhere while tabling for the College Republicans, and my first thought was "oh bullshit." Really? That's how I'm going to react to someone saying he got punched? Someone got pepper sprayed at a protest, and the reaction was like, OK, but it just takes ONE PERSON to use pepper spray and then we all look bad! Not, like, oh wow that's bad that someone got pepper sprayed.

So there's these students saying "sometimes I feel physically unsafe, and sometimes I just feel like everyone is really hostile to me for being conservative," and my reaction has been, for the most part, oh cry me a river. But then I think of this guy getting punched, if he really did get punched, right?, and this woman getting pepper sprayed, I can imagine that maybe I'd be reluctant to say anything if I were in their shoes, because I'm not super keen on getting punched or pepper sprayed myself. And you have these people who keep saying "I don't feel welcome as a conservative." Is that a net positive? I know plenty of students who are very worried about being deported, I know queer students and people of color who fear physical abuse way more often, I'm sure, than these conservative students do. Does this sort of balance things out?

(One side note, though: I always picture white folks when I think of the conservative students, but I have to remind myself that the majority of the school is not white, and that a number of the College Republicans I've seen interviewed have been Latinx.)

What happens is that everyone on campus seems to be dehumanizing each other. You know what happens every time, say, queer people protest to get the campus to deliver on the promise that they'd create a queer student space? The College Republicans, those names I recognize from campus newspaper articles, post something online about how much the protesters are stupid, and how much they hate white people, and it goes viral on Fox News and suddenly the whole internet is abuzz about the white-hating left at my school. So I'm not about to leap to the defense of the College Republicans and say "free speech is dead!", because that's the dumbest thing ever. But I'm also trying not to reflexively respond to someone saying "I don't feel safe" or "I feel totally unwelcome" by thinking "yeah, well that's what you get for having such shitty views." Because maybe they really don't feel safe, and maybe I shouldn't turn a blind eye?

There's real-world consequences to the way we think and talk about each other. I'm all for calling people out for bad behavior and other shitty stuff, but what's "other shitty stuff" here? If the automatic response to someone saying they're conservative (let alone conservative and feeling unsafe or unwelcome) is that they must be a jerk with some deep personal failing, or if someone asking a question about something really anyone should know means there's something deeply wrong with them and they deserve what they get -- I'm not sure how I feel about that. I can say it doesn't seem to be getting any better on my campus.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 4:38 PM on May 8, 2017 [11 favorites]


The problem isn't the calling out, it's how the calling out is done.

My approach is to always assume good intentions until proven otherwise. If you're going to call-out someone, you should do it as if that person were your good friend who you know is a good person and you want to keep them from embarrassment. If the person that you're calling out understands that and responds in kind, it's usually not at all a big deal.

Sometimes I say something sexist without realizing it. Mrs. VTX doesn't hesitate to call me out on it ever and I don't hesitate to apologize and ask for clarification if I don't understand. It's just, "Hey Sweet-heart, that's pretty sexist."

"Oh geez thanks. I can see that now. Sorry about that." We move on and other than me hopefully doing better next time, it's like it never happened.

I'm a white male from an upper-middle-class background. I'm racist, sexist, classist, and a bunch of others. I'm miles better than most but I'm not perfect. I get better by practicing and that practice goes better when other's call out the mistakes that I can't or don't see. It's a much easier conversation between spouses than between strangers but it's still my model for what call-out culture should look like.

If it's easy to call people out and easy to BE called out, then everyone grows.

Now, if after you've been gracious and tried to help them out they respond with hostility, doubling down, or escalating things then feel free to pile on and make that fucker's life miserable.
posted by VTX at 4:40 PM on May 8, 2017 [8 favorites]


Perhaps a dramatic way to make my point about shaming not necessarily being bad: if I walked into the middle of a packed student union, dropped trou and took a huge shit on the floor, I'd be shamed for it (even just a shocked "What the fuck, dude?" or confused laughter). The shaming is not puritanical or regressive, just a way to align and enforce the mostly-unspoken, agreed-upon societal expectation not to relieve yourself in the middle of packed public spaces.

So when someone argues that shaming leads to stress and ulcers and sadness, imagine this example and ask whether we're all currently super stressed and society is ruined because we're expected to use the washroom.
posted by naju at 4:43 PM on May 8, 2017 [5 favorites]


I'm so annoyed that the alt-right has hijacked "SJW" because it was actually a useful term in fandom.

Yeah, dude. I remember the .8 seconds that this term was used by other social justice minded folks in fandom to describe the people who, basically, used social justice terminology in service to their ship wars. (My favorite favorite was someone telling someone else that using an icon of their favorite pairing was "a sign system of oppression".)

But in general that kind of weird, shitty behavior in small stakes spaces is a small price to pay for people maybe thinking twice before having border patrol themed parties holy shit
posted by soren_lorensen at 4:44 PM on May 8, 2017 [9 favorites]


Navigating all of this can be difficult, especially if you're still largely becoming as a person (I mean, we're all works in progress, but teenagers are mostly just lumps of unformed people-clay). Which is why I sort of hate how teenagers and college students are the go-to examples for discussing "social justice culture." They're mostly kids who are trying to do better than prior generations but they're young and life's messy. They will eff up. A lot.

I agree with you that people under, say 25, shouldn't be allowed to use the internet. But how do we stop them?
posted by bongo_x at 4:46 PM on May 8, 2017 [7 favorites]


From The Chronicle of Higher Education a few days ago: “Academe’s Poisonous Call-Out Culture
posted by koavf at 4:54 PM on May 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


I'm so annoyed that the alt-right has hijacked "SJW" ...

and I'm annoyed that the conservative establishment has hijacked "witch hunt" because it's usually the people IN power doing the hunting and persecuting. (Also Republicans and Trump have much stronger ties to McCarthy and Cohn than most of us do.)
posted by puddledork at 5:00 PM on May 8, 2017 [5 favorites]


It's one thing to call people out for words or actions that are truly hurtful (and even then the goal should be to educate, not ruin someone's life), it's another to make hateful statements toward someone for being something they have no control over or shame people (even temporarily) prioritizing a cause that isn't the caller outer's pet cause (see the immediate backlash against participants in the Women's March from people ostensibly on the same damn side). The people who do this are just satisfying that base human desire to pretend one is better than others - the same one from which springs racism, sexism and all the other nasty-isms. This is not how you win hearts and minds and it terrifies me that we seem stuck in this infinite loop whilst Trump is taking us all to hell in a handbag. The left needs to get over it's petty impulses and come together fast or we are all going to fucking die. I'm beginning to think that a lot of people would rather die upon their hill of self righteous nonsense than actually have to get up off their arses and effect any kind of meaningful change that would require them to interact civilly with their fellow imperfect human beings.
posted by Brain Sturgeon at 5:01 PM on May 8, 2017 [8 favorites]


Call out culture is a valuable tactic to keep society humble and self-aware, but it can quickly spiral toward attention seeking. Like with anything else, it's the assholes who ruin a good thing.
posted by Christ, what an asshole at 5:04 PM on May 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


To the people saying this seems like small-potatoes worry next to actual Nazis, well yeah. But I also worry that this kind of thing makes it harder to fight actual Nazis, because of the way it can erode trust among activist communities.

Someone above mentioned "trashing" - I first learned about it in the context of the 1970s women's movement; many of the women in the movement said it was one of the things that actually killed the movement. Movements grow and thrive on trust and social ties. If those are frayed, the movement can't grow. Now, one way to build mutual trust is to nurture an environment where privileged people can be called out on their behavior - it certainly doesn't build trust to silence less-privileged voices! But again, there are ways to do that that build social ties and trust, and I just don't think a snarky tweet is how you do that.
posted by lunasol at 5:06 PM on May 8, 2017 [17 favorites]


Which is the point that always seems to get lost in these discussions

It's not lost on me, as a person who's dealt with both short term and longer term mental health issues, and been a non-native language speaker in public school when I was younger.

But both aspects are important. Shaming in itself may not always be unnecessary and undesirable, but shaming strangers over the slightest missteps and doing it as publicly as possible and with a sense of glee, instead of something more like a modest, shared sense of shame on behalf of the rest of humanity, seems like medieval, crabs in a bucket culture, caused by repressed resentment over larger political and economic developments we can't influence.

That resentment comes out inappropriately at others who are in reality much more like us than the true elites with real power, over minor superficial differences in taste or as a result of confusion and hurt caused by stereotyping.
posted by saulgoodman at 5:15 PM on May 8, 2017 [11 favorites]


Shame and guilt are words used for the emotional reaction to learning or believing one is wrong. Almost everyone breaks this down into one being "good" and the other being "bad" except for people who are entirely permissive (and later backlash into being authoritarian but that's a whole other dynamic).

"I did something wrong" operates on two levels. One is "I should change what I do" and the other is "I'm a bad person". By and large, "I'm a bad person" is fairly useless and is almost always aligned with either shame or guilt as the "bad" thing to do to other people. "I should change what I do" is the useful one and the one to try to emphasize in oneself. It is not easy; in the US, at least, "I'm a bad person" is beaten into us (literally or metaphorically) for most of our lives by most authority figures because it's a nice big button they can hit to try to control us.

I believe we need a world in which people can learn "I should change what I do" when they hurt other people or help perpetuate unequal systems. Whatever we call it, we need it - even when it makes us feel badly for a while, because it will. I have had my fair share of sullen sulks about being wrong, and I've been working on this particular emotion for years.

That being said, I'm not sure what this "call out culture" really is; it seems to be used to indicate "targeted harassment" but the situations described are almost always "people said I did something wrong/am a bad person" and not actually about someone getting 500-1000 insulting/threatening replies, or someone getting doxxed, or someone getting swatted, or bomb threats being called in - so I get confused.

It seems to be used similarly to social justice warrior or virtue signalling or angry black person or any number of other insults - as a way to say "you think you're doing something good and trying to improve the world, but you should sit down, shut up, and not object to what other people do". What this means is that the people objecting to "call out culture" are attempting to simultaneously use the exact same system they're objecting to other people using.

I've been called out occasionally, almost always with the most incredible kindness and compassion. The times I've not been called out and figured out I was wrong later haunt me more. The times I won't be called out and won't notice keep me vigilant.
posted by Deoridhe at 5:31 PM on May 8, 2017 [16 favorites]


but the situations described are almost always "people said I did something wrong/am a bad person" and not actually about someone getting 500-1000 insulting/threatening replies

Someone getting 500-1000 insulting/threatening replies because someone else said they did something wrong/are a bad person is in fact an extremely frequent feature of callout culture. I see examples on Tumblr nearly every week, and that's after curating my feed specifically to avoid that sort of thing as much as possible.
posted by waffleriot at 5:41 PM on May 8, 2017 [10 favorites]


The guy in that video seems like he enjoys having weird hair and that he wasn't all that bothered by people making bon mots about his weird hair online for a month.

posted by 23skidoo


Yeah it was fun for him at first. I thought that the cocktail-napkin caricature posted by tobascodagama was very well-observed.

But it turned into stalking. It was like Gawker had a bounty on him, and people were searching Williamsburg on some kind of demented treasure hunt, so they could upload new snaps of their prey.
posted by StickyCarpet at 5:42 PM on May 8, 2017 [4 favorites]


Maybe, just maybe, that poor college girl will realize that theme parties are never anything but a huge rash of stereotypes and start holding just "parties" instead.
posted by graventy at 5:54 PM on May 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


"In the context of call-out culture, it is easy to forget that the individual we are calling out is a human being, and that different human beings in different social locations will be receptive to different strategies for learning and growing." - A Note On Call-Out Culture from briarpatch magazine
posted by Paddle to Sea at 6:01 PM on May 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


Perhaps a dramatic way to make my point about shaming not necessarily being bad: if I walked into the middle of a packed student union, dropped trou and took a huge shit on the floor, I'd be shamed for it (even just a shocked "What the fuck, dude?" or confused laughter).

I don't think that really captures the essence of the argument, though, because everyone agrees that shitting on the floor is a completely unacceptable thing to do, whereas there can be considerable disagreement about where to draw the line when it comes to social justice issues.

Consider the following spectrum of behavior:

A. Making an overtly racist comment
B. Making a comment that is subtly racist, or that may be perceived as such
C. Disagreeing about whether a comment is actually racist
D. Failing to call out A or B
E. Politely calling out A or B
F. Angrily calling out A or B

Pretty much everyone agrees that A is unacceptable, and increasingly there is consensus that B is unacceptable as well. Beyond that, things get fuzzier. C is a common cause of pile-ons. If you're in any kind of high-profile position with respect to the media, you are guaranteed to receive flak for D. People who most frequently do F tend to sneer at those who only do E, and occasionally they will go full DEFCON against allies who do D.

I think the big breakdown in this thread is that some people assume an article criticizing call-out culture must necessarily be a statement in support of A or B, whereas others are pointing out that there might be a problem when even C or D can draw the wrath of the firing squad.
posted by dephlogisticated at 6:02 PM on May 8, 2017 [13 favorites]


I mean, it's college. Put on some music, make cheap booze available, and let it be known you're having a party and then a party happens.

If you really need themes, you can have a different, brilliant, liberal friendly theme every 7 days. Shorter if someone else will use their account to post the ask.me.
posted by VTX at 6:03 PM on May 8, 2017 [3 favorites]


Someone getting 500-1000 insulting/threatening replies because someone else said they did something wrong/are a bad person is in fact an extremely frequent feature of callout culture.

And if he had discussed that in his piece, Young Connor might have had something of worth. Instead, his whole piece revolved around individuals who were bothered by how others viewed them. And yes, the girl who was forced to think a bit more about her choices might be borderline (but then again, she was never subjected to being called out), the college conservative and the TERF made willful choices to adopt hateful, bigoted philosophies, and are now crying foul when they find that doing so has resulted in social opprobrium. That's not being called out, that's having to deal with the consequences of your choices. And that's the heart of Young Connor's piece - he feels that when he does shit like trying to shame feminists for complaining about a fraternity putting up rapey banners, he shouldn't be held accountable. Sorry, but no - Young Connor's made his choices, and it's high time he learned to live with them.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:04 PM on May 8, 2017 [7 favorites]


Perhaps a dramatic way to make my point about shaming not necessarily being bad: if I walked into the middle of a packed student union, dropped trou and took a huge shit on the floor, I'd be shamed for it (even just a shocked "What the fuck, dude?" or confused laughter). The shaming is not puritanical or regressive, just a way to align and enforce the mostly-unspoken, agreed-upon societal expectation not to relieve yourself in the middle of packed public spaces.

So when someone argues that shaming leads to stress and ulcers and sadness, imagine this example and ask whether we're all currently super stressed and society is ruined because we're expected to use the washroom.


This analogy is a little generous with itself, since a good old spicy floor poop is something that is physical, unambiguous, and undependent on cultural context.

The endlessly fractal layers of offence-causing behaviour that notions like cultural appropriation allow for are none of those things.
posted by Sebmojo at 6:16 PM on May 8, 2017 [3 favorites]


I see examples on Tumblr nearly every week, and that's after curating my feed specifically to avoid that sort of thing as much as possible.

I sit corrected. I'd love some examples from the past couple of weeks that you've seen; I've not seen this on Tumblr so I'd like to see what makes my feed different.
posted by Deoridhe at 6:21 PM on May 8, 2017


I feel like part of the intensity of call out culture at college campuses (generally, small selective ones, which is where a lot of these stories come out of and which are not remotely representative of the college experience of most students, although they are representative of the higher echelons of coastal journalism) is because students are figuring out a vocabulary, but also because it's one of the first times in your life when you might have the ability to actually tell people to cut their shit out and have people who will back you up. (And the mix of people at those kinds of schools I think also leads to many people, for the first time, being in a place where someone will tell you to cut your shit out.)

And for every tempest in a teapot incident that blows up, there's a years worth of incidents of intimidation of minority students that does not get media attention for a long time. For instance, St. Olaf cancelled classes earlier this month after a year's worth of threatening, racial-slur filled notes directed at the 2% of their students who are African-American. The Washington Post wrote it up once the class cancellation actually happened. In an environment where things like that happen, I have a hard time blaming a student for maybe being a little testy when someone hosts a racially insensitive party or says they don't think it's a big deal for some dudes to caricature Mexicans while getting drunk on a Friday.

(I'm not trying to pick on St. Olaf here. or imply that their students are pulling that kind of stunt. There are incidents like that at other SLACs across the country; there were some at Grinnell when I was there in the first decade of the 2000s. People threw a "white trash" party when I was there and were correctly called out for making light of rural poverty in a town that had plenty of it, for instance. But that showed up in my inbox this week.)

So much complaining about call out culture sounds like complaining about having to consider how your actions affected the feelings of other people.
posted by dismas at 6:31 PM on May 8, 2017 [13 favorites]


I believe we need a world in which people can learn "I should change what I do" when they hurt other people or help perpetuate unequal systems.

I like the point you made.

I can definitely work on changing what I do. But who I am is a lot more fixed and unchangeable.

Let me (incautioiusly) add that I'm a white woman, so I have a bunch of privilege. I can't stop being white and I can't in any effective way short-circuit my privilege so that it stops working for me. So.... if I get called out on my white privilege I might feel stressed and spin in circles and not know how to change what I do, since the hypothetical call out I just made up is about who I am. If I did something obnoxious, I can apologize and vow to stop doing it. If what I am is the problem, and I need something to do differently, is that different thing (at first) just listening and trying hard not to argue? Especially about topics that aren't close to my lived experience?
posted by puddledork at 6:33 PM on May 8, 2017 [3 favorites]


Just watched 'Hated in the Nation' a couple of days ago #DeathTo was terrifying in its consequences.
posted by unliteral at 6:37 PM on May 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


Eyebrows McGee: in the intervening 20 years [the campus newspaper columnist] become a Democrat and is one of the top fundraisers for the state party, a high-level functionary for the party, a government official for the Dem governor, and a major force behind LGBT equality measures in our state. I have no idea what happened there (well, I have a few guesses)

Not sure if this is what you're getting at, but when I was at the U of I there was one particularly obnoxious campus newspaper columnist (he wrote an outraged column about how he, as a pedestrian, "had" to share the bicycle paths on campus with actual cyclists), whose general attitude did a 180 after he came out, in a column.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:49 PM on May 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


I think callout culture is bad, mainly because the more privileged (and also the more right wing) you are, the less you can be hurt from a campaign of public shaming.

Few racist frat boys or whoever will suffer any material consequences; their families, future employers, and good old boy networks don't care. In the working world someone with a strong network of professional relationships is going to be able to bounce back from some bad publicity unless they do something truly egregious. Emotionally speaking most of them will just laugh it off with their friends. The best case is someone really does learn from it, which I'm sure happens sometimes.

On the other hand, say, a first-year queer college student who accidentally says the wrong thing might find themselves shunned from the only social circles they can really belong to. Etc etc. Generally speaking, being cut off from privilege and power often goes along with much more fragile mental health, confidence and identity -- so in that way too people with less privilege will suffer more from public shaming.

Like, in some sense the definition of privilege is the ability to shrug off all this shit.
posted by vogon_poet at 6:50 PM on May 8, 2017 [20 favorites]


I thought that the cocktail-napkin caricature posted by tobascodagama was very well-observed.

(For the record, that was chinese_fashion, not me. I'm sure I have similarly embarrassing incidents in my own bloggy past, but that's why I've hidden all the posts there.)

Anyway, I think lunasol nails it.

And, listen: fuck TFA and fuck Connor Friedersdorf. I can't stress that enough. There's nothing good in there, it's all trash, I'm ignoring it and so should everyone else.

But the almost-always-white "activist" who throws a big, performative fit over some stupid, irrelevant thing and calls all their friends to circle-jerk around with them about how terrible so-and-so is or whatever is definitely A Problem.

It's something I've lately noticed in particular from "hard left" crowds on Twitter. They'll screengrab something from a black activist or columnist, one screenshot out of a giant thread, and parade it around like "LOOK AT THIS FUCKING NEOLIBERAL".

The most recent example I saw was Marcus Johnson trying to make a point about socialism not doing jack shit to actually alleviate conditions of racism. And then somebody screencapped one tweet out of the thread to make it look like he was one some kind of "all hail capitalism" kick. Which is bullshit, that's not what he was saying at all, but now you've got a bunch of white leftists patting themselves on the back for being wise enough to condemn the neoliberal coastal elitist and nodding as they tell each other that identity politics is holding back the Revolution.

Maybe referring to that kind of thing as "callout culture" is technically incorrect or maybe the term is muddled beyond usefulness now, but: A) that shit is wrong as hell and B) we need some kind of name for it, so we can tell people to cut it the fuck out.
posted by tobascodagama at 6:59 PM on May 8, 2017 [24 favorites]


Is shaming always puritanical and regressive, though?

For anybody else interested in this question the second half of this Delete Your Account podcast ep talks about the concept of reintegrative shaming. The recording kind of sucks but the content's worth your time.
posted by clavicle at 7:10 PM on May 8, 2017 [5 favorites]


for every tempest in a teapot incident that blows up, there's a years worth of incidents of intimidation of minority students that does not get media attention for a long time.

Yeah, but the point of calling out racist frat parties isn't to make the racists feel shame on their own, the point of calling out racist frat parties is you're making a paper trail so that people can't say "Huh, I didn't know that was racist" anymore. Frats do get shut down over stupid racist stuff. May not be 100% of the time, but it happens, and it happens because people call attention to it.

And from the protest laws thread: America in 2017: we see the first-ever mass felony charges for protestors at the inauguration, simply on the basis of their presence, while the handwringing classes worry that freedom of speech cannot possibly survive if Ann Coulter doesn't get paid $20,000 to speak on a highly-exclusive platform that is only available to a handful of people.
posted by enn at 12:25 AM on May 9 [32 favorites +] [!]


In May 2017, let us not forget where we are.

We live in a world where Russia and shady shady shady supervillians are stealing elections and engaging in disinformation campaigns via the public. We live in a world where "callout culture" feels soon to be superceded by the term "regressive left". It's not at all hyperbole to say that there's a war on. Language, identity, and values are the weapons of choice by bad faith actors on both sides, and shaming is part and parcel of our everyday existence. Our feelings of outrage and impotence are the bullets in the guns.

I don't have a point beyond keep your cool, know your own values and limits, keep your eyes peeled for real bad faith actors, reserve your enmity for them, and remember the power inherent in your callout. It wouldn't be such a sore spot for people if shaming didn't work.
posted by saysthis at 7:31 PM on May 8, 2017 [12 favorites]


dismas: "For instance, St. Olaf cancelled classes earlier this month after a year's worth of threatening, racial-slur filled notes directed at the 2% of their students who are African-American"

Also, American University had an incident earlier this month where bananas carved with the initials AKA (presumably referencing Alpha Kappa Alpha, a predominantly black sorority) were hung from nooses around their campus, shortly after the university elected their first African-American woman as student president (who is also a member of AKA). Here's the WaPo writeup, which notes not only the St. Olaf incident, but also incidents at UMD, East Tennessee State, and U. Mich.

So, yeah. Whatever ol' Conor is talking about regarding "the destructiveness of call-out culture", this stuff is also happening. Yes, we're allowed to care about more than one thing at a time. But, what a writer spends their precious column-inches and word-counts on surely must suggest something about their priorities.
posted by mhum at 7:36 PM on May 8, 2017 [13 favorites]


a four-month controversy with multiple protests over (true story!) whether a cat could run for student body president

Well? Can a cat run for student body president? Don't raise important issues and then not allow us to discuss them!
posted by byanyothername at 7:38 PM on May 8, 2017 [11 favorites]


a four-month controversy with multiple protests over (true story!) whether a cat could run for student body president

Well? Can a cat run for student body president? Don't raise important issues and then not allow us to discuss them!


As long as it's not a bigoted cat, I'm for it.
posted by saysthis at 7:42 PM on May 8, 2017 [4 favorites]


Thing is, people calling other people out aren't always right, in any real sense. There is, in some arenas, a culture of performative callouts that are based on interpretation to varying degrees, and where calling out is a sort of cultural capital to the point that it almost seems competitive at times.

Example: Internet person one asks about what the difference between first and second degree crimes in criminal law. Internet person two gives a brief explanation, and internet person three calls out internet person two for saying that intent is magic.

That was just flat out wrong and ridiculous, and the result of internet person three having a kneejerk reaction to the word intent. (And yeah, I'm pretty sure it wasn't a joke, just based on the specific internet persona.)

But there are grayer areas. Does someone having generally agreed upon bad attitudes in one area make them unquotable in other domains? So if a TERF has an interesting insight in one specific area that has nothing to do with being trans-exclusive, is it OK to talk about it, or are they just banished from polite conversation? Is someone who quotes someone who it turns out is a TERF also by extension a TERF?

(These are both true stories, but if you want to think I'm lying or exaggerating them, feel free to treat them as hypotheticals.)

And where it's OK to shame people for bigotries but not OK to shame people for bad, kneejerk accusations of bigotry, callouts become a kind of cultural capital. (And, yeah, maybe "virtue signaling.")
posted by ernielundquist at 8:04 PM on May 8, 2017 [14 favorites]


For the record, that was chinese_fashion, not me.
posted by tobascodagama


Oh, sorry, my mistake. But anyway, chinese_fashion, that was an exemplary caricature you did there, of the Fucking Hipster with the dumb hair -- you well-captured Chris's essence in those few strokes of the pen.
posted by StickyCarpet at 8:11 PM on May 8, 2017


campuses have ALWAYS been hotbeds of "callout culture" where students freak out over every tiny thing and tempests live in teapots

QFT. I wrote for and assoc-edited our school paper in the early 90s and we also had 4 years of similar controversies and flaps. Probably the worst: when the rugby team's initation ritual for new players involved going into the woods and being forced to eat tuna from the crotch of a blowup doll (I shit you not), and a few players ratted this out, sparking an intense round of disciplinary actions and some highly charged debates about sexism and violence and rape culture in the student paper and in classrooms and in the dining halls. There were things like people graffiting slurs on AIDS Awareness Day posters. There were any number of controversies and callouts, some on sensitive and serious issues, some on ridiculous ones and campus-centric ones.

If there's any difference it really is in the ways social media can amplify these events beyond the campus community. For us, the rugby incident was a pretty big deal on the campus, and a big deal to the punished students and their parents, and everyone who was kinda traumatized by the notion that their classmates/roomates/friends had come up with this idea. BUt unless it somehow drew the interest of local media, and then that coverage somehow drew the interest of the AP or a TV network, it was going to have its entire arc as a controversy start and stop on the campus within a matter of weeks or, at worst, months. Now, of course, these things become our parables, these case studies through which we try to have conversations about culture. Unfortunately, real people get caught in those gears, and yeah, that is for sure stressful.

Though that poor-little-me-I'm-so-confused-about-my-shallow-as-shit-Round-the-World-Party line is total crap and I feel dumber for having read it. Feeling very much done with the Atlantic these days. Pretend intellectualism for the middlebrow moderate.
posted by Miko at 8:15 PM on May 8, 2017 [13 favorites]


It's one thing to call out shitty exploitative behavior. Where I have to get off the bus is when this does get performative and one-upmanshippy, where people claim that they're really doing pro-humanist social justice work by joining the circular firing squad of retributive callings-out and basically shitting in the punch bowl of what should be groups of allies organizing around antiracist, antisexist, antishitbag activism and dialogue.

Recent example: the local group that organized (and organized around) the March for Science back on 22 April has largely fallen into silence because a lot of people cannot help but make the perfect the enemy of the good:

Instead of starting with
"The march was really unbelievably white..."
"...and male."
"The march was insufficiently intersectional in its critque..."
"Nobody is talking about the impact of the new visa fuckery from the administration on science and research..."
"Can we lay off the politics please?"
[etc.]1

...and going toward "and man, this is a seriously awesome opportunity to start a productive dialogue with people who I clearly share values with!"

It devolved into a fair bit of "I CAN'T BELIEVE THAT THIS ISN'T CENTRAL TO THE PROJECT AND THEREFORE THE ENTIRE ENTERPRISE IS IRRETRIEVABLY SHIT AND WE SHOULD ALL BE DEEPLY ASHAMED THAT WE WERE EVER ASSOCIATED WITH IT!!!!!!"2

And it's not as though this isn't the 343rd time this has happened. The thing, ultimately, that I find deeply distasteful about the performative and retributive manifestations of callout culture is that it's fucking easy. It's way easier than making common cause with someone who is coming at the same issue 90 degrees removed. That, I think, is what's so disappointing, and where I find myself, frankly, wanting to dissociate myself with people who might otherwise be my own allies.

Insofar, therefore, that this tendency on the left is endemic, it gets harder and harder to give answer to critiques that the left is a hornet's nest of backbiting and, well, a giant game of musical fainting couches.

1Actual critiques, all of which had validity and were worth talking about.
2Attempting to capture the spirit of the complaints and probably exaggerating. Slightly.

posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 8:22 PM on May 8, 2017 [21 favorites]


So much of the, well, calling out of callous culture, even in this thread, is steeped in aggressive and hyperbolic language that it's really just pouring gas on the fire. "performative", "virtue signalling", "fainting couch"... This doesn't seem likely to help very much.
posted by ominous_paws at 8:45 PM on May 8, 2017 [6 favorites]


It's interesting to me that most people aren't engaging with the socia media aspect of the article.

I was only on any social media (aside from MF) for two years, but I saw a few people destroy their careers by saying dumb (and genuinely offensive) things on Facebook, things that in an IRL exchange would've probably merited a strong rebuke from a colleague. That personal interaction might have had an effect, but on FB, it just became a pile on and a doubling down from the offender.

Did the offender learn anything? I doubt it, but now they're angry and ostracized. And righteously indignant.

I just don't know if humanity has had the time to develop a working online culture.

That's why we're all here, right? We appreciate the hard work and constant vigilance keeping this place from descending into chaos.
posted by rock swoon has no past at 9:04 PM on May 8, 2017 [5 favorites]


Metafilter: hard work and constant vigilance keeping this place from descending into chaos.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 9:07 PM on May 8, 2017 [5 favorites]


"Well? Can a cat run for student body president? Don't raise important issues and then not allow us to discuss them!"

That cat did run, but SADLY, the cat only won student body VICE president, despite claims the cat had spoken to God through a burning bush. The cat was also an illegal resident as pets were not allowed in the dorms. But the cat served a full year as student body vice president with distinction. Her owner served as student body king, because it was just that kind of year. Both the cat and her owner were elected to serve second full terms.

The cat's owner is now a quite senior reconstructive eye surgeon at UCSF, which just goes to show that student fuckery does not portend student failure. The cat, I presume, is dead, as it's been 45 years.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:26 PM on May 8, 2017 [14 favorites]


But there are grayer areas. Does someone having generally agreed upon bad attitudes in one area make them unquotable in other domains? So if a TERF has an interesting insight in one specific area that has nothing to do with being trans-exclusive, is it OK to talk about it, or are they just banished from polite conversation? Is someone who quotes someone who it turns out is a TERF also by extension a TERF?

You may already know that this is a common practice on tumblr, that people will try to completely erase TERFs from their feed. Not just unfollowing, not just blocking, but if someone else reblogs a post from a TERF, no matter how unrelated, they will message that person and say "hey, that post you reblogged was from a TERF." And usually that person will say thanks. Because there are a surprising number of people on board with erasing TERFs from the public discourse.

And this probably sounds really extreme and censory, and I am not normally the kind of person who would go for that. Except. Every so often I come across a TERF-y post, and its ... really viscerally upsetting. And the TERF worldview has a lot of base assumptions that make themselves known in other contexts. So I'll be reading a top-shelf fandom-feminist rant, not about trans stuff, and I'll be nodding along, and suddenly I realize that the author thinks that I am a sick garbage person and a traitor to womanhood, and it feels like I just walked off a cliff. Last year, when I was much less confident in being trans, one of these posts threw me into a tailspin for a week.

I wish I could find an example. I have seriously tried to engage with radfem ideology and think about whether they're wrong and what they might be right about. But every time I tried it was like. Torturing myself. It took me a long ass time to realize I didn't have to listen to people who thought I was a sick garbage person. And part of the reason it took me such a long time is because of this whole attitude that we can't just banish people from polite conversation. These posts kept tripping me up and yanking my chain because I didn't think I had the right to be so censory.

I don't know what all that means in the larger context but, yes, I do not want to take part in polite conversation with TERFs on any subject.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 9:47 PM on May 8, 2017 [25 favorites]


I was only on any social media (aside from MF) for two years, but I saw a few people destroy their careers by saying dumb (and genuinely offensive) things on Facebook, things that in an IRL exchange would've probably merited a strong rebuke from a colleague. That personal interaction might have had an effect, but on FB, it just became a pile on and a doubling down from the offender.
This. Jon Ronson wrote a book about the effects of public shaming on social media, and provided various examples of people who posted something terrible online, and due to the brigading that happens on social media ended up getting doxxed, fired, and in some cases, becoming suicidal. I'm not sure that pushing people to the brink like this is necessarily the way forward for improving social interactions and educating people. While the examples in this article seem pretty tame--OH NOS, I AM STRESS BECAUSE PEOPLE HATE MY IGNORANT TEQUILA SOMBRERO PARTIES--the real concern for me is when people make honest mistakes and get zero compassion. The nature of archived online interactions can mean that the stupid shit you wrote on Usenet in 1996 or posted on YouTube in 2010 can follow you to your deathbed.
posted by xyzzy at 9:59 PM on May 8, 2017 [8 favorites]


One thing that I think should be somehow implemented - minor social media vs adult social media. Like, somehow, when you turn 24 or something, your social media presence self destructs and you start over. Because... Damn. If there were a written record of the shit I said at 16, 18, 21? Omg. I was a trainwreck of terrible conservatism, with a dash of racism, and I said stupid things like "I'm not a feminist, I'm a humanist" because I didn't freaking know better. AND I'M A WOMAN! And who knows, if I had to spend years defending what had said in print, I might have doubled down on some of those things instead of just leaving them be and hoping no one remembered exactly what I said.
Do I think call out culture is often necessary? Sure. Do I think it goes way over and above what is optimal to promote positive change? Absolutely​. Almost every time.
posted by greermahoney at 10:10 PM on May 8, 2017 [6 favorites]


> but on FB, it just became a pile on and a doubling down from the offender.

The doubling-down is entirely within the control of the person who is called out. I witnessed a particularly hideous example recently on a fb group I'm on, in which a white woman said a shitty and kinda racist thing, was (gently) called out by a black woman about the shitty thing, and the white woman double- and triple-downed and ended up telling the black woman that she couldn't really suffer racism because she drives a BMW and lives in a nice Connecticut suburb. The whole thing was horrifying and gross, and could have been ENTIRELY avoided if the white woman (who even pulled out the "yeahbut some of my best friends..." card) had said from the start something like "Oh, damn, I didn't realize what I'd said would be so painful, I totally stepped in it, and I don't totally get why but I am really sorry I hurt people and I am listening" and then, you know, listened.

It's like the thing where it's not the crime, it's the cover-up. The nuclear explosion of the social media callout can often be avoided or at least stepped down to less-than-nuclear by an apology. Because even if you don't quite get how or why people are hurt? They are in fact hurt, and your boneheadedness caused it. Say sorry, and do your best to mean it and learn how to not do it again.
posted by rtha at 10:11 PM on May 8, 2017 [14 favorites]


Because fallout culture used to just be "telling people not to be a dick", and it would be confined to their actual social crowd.

From what I remember before social media, it really involved a person in the crowd being harassed to the point where they complained...and then being exiled from the social crowd, while the guy being a dick got to move on to the next victim.

It involved women taking each other aside and quietly telling each other about missing stairs, such as don't be alone in a room with Isaac Asimov, don't leave your kid alone with Walter Breen. And it worked fine, didn't it? Well, except for the women and children that weren't protected. But the important thing is, everything was kept nice and polite and civilized.

And now, with the advent of the internet and callout culture, just look at what's happened: take Jim Frenkel for instance. Banned from WisCon, fired from Tor Books, and then later again fired from Oddysey Con, because women, instead of making quiet little whispers to each other, called him out in public, and people believed them. And people are STILL saying he should not be put in a position of authority at a convention, because he serially harasses women.

All because of callout culture.

I can really see why guys want to go back to the good old days.
posted by happyroach at 10:49 PM on May 8, 2017 [33 favorites]


So my comment is about the nature of Facebook, Twitter, ect. compared to messaging-app culture. I find that the former - the public broadcast networks - tend to attract tons of toxic discussions where people, hiding behind screens and potential anonymity, are happy to be assholes because we've all been punched down at in front of people we want the respect of, so it's kinda rewarding to be the one socially punching down to someone else, amirite? This perpetuates that callout culture without giving people the space for examination and processing because although person A can intend, in calling you out, to just bring awareness to your behavior, you can hear it as a personal attack because suddenly there's a ton of stuff at stake - your reputation among your peers, your potential future career even, all the things that the students touched on in the article.

The messaging apps, by comparison tend to promote healthy discussions, and I think that's because for us to have a conversation where we have an open mind, privacy is almost a requirement. That's a given when it's someone speaking directly to you, not in a public facing forum (a group chat on one of the various messaging apps is not necessarily a public facing forum - private Facebook groups facilitate this too), but tends to go out the window when we are speaking on a public forum. I do not think I could have had some of the challenging discussions I have had over the last 3 years on the public-facing sections of Facebook, given the very nature of the platform. but here on MeFi, because it's an exclusive club, I have had some of those conversations (my first Ask was a wakeup call galore).

So I think there's a thread here, not really touched on, about the nature of privacy itself in the digital age and how platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Mastadon, ect. can compromise that feeling of privacy, which in turn brings with it an escalated emotional state and all the garbage that can come with that for any given individual. And I say this believing that Mastadon, at least, serves both as a wonderful tool for large-scale engagement (Facebook is advertising based so, as we have seen, can be compromised, and Twitter we all know and love-hate). But when it comes to reaching people in a vulnerable place, to help them change their mind, large scale engagement is the exact opposite of what you need - you need intimate, small, private conversations you know will stay in group. Those public facing platforms mostly fail at this, from my experience.

This also depends on communication tactics used by the individuals at hand.
posted by thebotanyofsouls at 10:56 PM on May 8, 2017 [4 favorites]


puddledork> Pretty much, to begin with. The first step when the call-out is specifically privilege is to stop, calm yourself down, take a break and soothe yourself, then return to the call-out in some way (is it written? Texted? Can you google the circumstances and see what has already been written about it?).

Remind yourself you're a good person trying to do your best, then do your best to understand - but I'm specifically encouraging you to seek what has been already written, not to ask people calling you out for help. This is about you putting the effort into learning a perspective which is new to you, and part of that is putting the time in.
posted by Deoridhe at 11:23 PM on May 8, 2017 [4 favorites]


Another thing which helped me is realizing that being called-out within a social justice context was actually a complement. It means someone who is already tired is willing to extend me the benefit of the doubt that I will value then and listen to them. I try to not let them down. (I still sulk in private because I am PERFECT!!! ;) And the most horrible person in the universe!!! And *cue Gothic music and dramatic lighting* )
posted by Deoridhe at 11:34 PM on May 8, 2017 [6 favorites]


naju: if I walked into the middle of a packed student union, dropped trou and took a huge shit on the floor

But this is the rub, isn't it? Because sure, we probably all agree that the person who does that should be shamed. But it's not that simple. Context mitigates what degree of calling-out or shaming should ensue, as do the subsequent responses from the subject of the callout - but those are both things that are stripped away by the internet.

And people have wildly differing views of what constitutes a public shaming offence. No-one can convincingly argue that all callouts are created equal in terms of inciting incident, let alone degree of appropriate response. They're not all shits on the floor, but the person who merely accidentally bumped someone and didn't say sorry loudly enough can get called out just as badly, if not worse. Not all offences are created equal.

And that's separate also from things like the gleeful ally pile-ons; I know a number of times I've seen people ostensibly on my side do and say things ostensibly in my name (/the name of groups I belong to) that are either far worse than the original offence, or presuming and claiming offence where none was taken. Not all callouts and not all shamers are created equal either.
posted by gadge emeritus at 11:35 PM on May 8, 2017 [8 favorites]


It seems like "callout culture" means something different depending on who you ask. We have people talking about sites like Tumblr, but then we also have people talk about the real world (I brought up my campus), and other places.

Also, I don't think folks disagree that some people deserve to be called out, but it's not like that's always clear cut. I once got called out over a total misunderstanding, and I was called out in a really personally insulting way (as in saying "well now you know how it feels to be uncomfortable" to someone who grew up in an abusive household). It was incredibly hurtful. And you're basically powerless in that situation and forever after -- even now, I'm sure some people, if not most, will assume that I probably did deserve it, because as far as a lot of people are concerned, who ever complains about this besides people who deserve to be called out and can't handle being challenged? I mean, what do you do when that happens? Just accept that things are better on average, even if it sucks for you in that moment?
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 11:51 PM on May 8, 2017 [6 favorites]


How did columnists eat before they were able to sell this article a dozen or so times a year?
posted by running order squabble fest at 1:03 AM on May 9, 2017 [10 favorites]


I mean, what do you do when that happens? Just accept that things are better on average, even if it sucks for you in that moment?

My experience has actually been that, in general, if you have the space to be civil about it... well, I got a couple unpleasant anons once on Tumblr about a comment I'd made that referenced some negative stereotypes about Mexicans, responded to one of them pointing out that a) I am Mexican, and b) they were misconstruing what I said, and there wasn't any further pile-on. There's a difference between coming back with "let me clarify what I meant and the context in which it was said" and coming back with "what I said wasn't THAT bad so don't be offended", which I think is the thing that most often gets further outrage. The hard thing is continuing to be civil about these things even when you're personally hurting, which I will freely admit I am not, always, but I don't think "any response will just get you in worse trouble" is really accurate. Sometimes responses will just get flat out ignored, especially on social media, but there are definitely better and worse ways to handle it.
posted by Sequence at 1:35 AM on May 9, 2017 [4 favorites]


An interesting aspect of callout culture is that it replicates the desire to please -- even prostrate -- and the fear of offending that society generally inculcates in the poor and the powerless. The method works in so far as it instructs to be humble and considerate towards others. It works less well when it reproduces the crippling need for validation and diminished agency.
posted by dmh at 1:39 AM on May 9, 2017 [3 favorites]


Here's a man who held super-vile opinions in college who not too long thereafter repented of them, did a complete 180, and has spent 20 years raising money and awareness and being really effective at getting laws passed to protect the people he used to rail against. It'd be a super-shitty thing to destroy his career, and undermine all the work he's done and continues to do, over the fact that he was an asshole when he was 20.

This sounds more like an issue with political "oppo" methods than with call-out culture, if you ask me.
posted by Dysk at 2:46 AM on May 9, 2017 [5 favorites]


It's clearly useful to tell people not to be a dick, but that implies maintaining some appearances of being constructive. I think "callout culture" refers to ostracizing someone for being a dick. It's a move for when you actually hold power though.

You cannot dismantle the master’s house with his own tools. You must actually hold the power to exclude the target from somewhere they want to be or else your callout will backfire.

I think callouts work fine for improving smallish communities by excluding problematic members. Also well organized "callouts" work for highlighting corporate miss-behavior when the corporation has entrenched competition who the callout can further entrench, ala Lyft benefiting from Uber boycotts.

If you callout actually innocent comments, then you may find yourself loosing credibility. If you callout all of flyover country, then they may well elect a Drumpf. etc.

Also, we frequently do need blowback against bad callouts. All the efforts to protest Peter Singer have basically shown that a bunch of people are de facto right-to-lifers, for example.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:58 AM on May 9, 2017 [2 favorites]


There's a difference between coming back with "let me clarify what I meant and the context in which it was said" and coming back with "what I said wasn't THAT bad so don't be offended", which I think is the thing that most often gets further outrage.

I don't know, I've seen people respond to "let me clarify" with something along the lines of "you said what you said, and you can't try to walk it back now that people have called you out for it." And to be fair, depending on how it's phrased, a clarification, especially one you're reading over the internet without any inflection or other cues, can easily sound like an excuse, or like "oh, it wasn't THAT bad."
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 4:13 AM on May 9, 2017 [3 favorites]


Conor Friedersdorf is of course either unaware of it or is ignoring it to make a different political point, but people have been having nuanced discussions about call-out culture in leftist activist spaces for some time now. There's the idea of calling in developed nicely in several posts on Black Girl Dangerous, but reminiscent of some similar discussions from second wave feminism. Somewhat relatedly, folks have been discussing bad jacketing, why it can be harmful to movements, and what to do about it since the early COINTELPRO days. For those of you who are interested, there's also a growing body of literature (more readily accessible as well as academic research) on the role of community in building and maintaining political (especially social justice oriented) movements, and on creating communities consistent with a movement's political ideals. (Discussions and debates around prefigurative politics fall into this latter category.) If I have time, I'll try to collect a bibliography. (That would probably make a good FPP, actually.)
posted by eviemath at 5:14 AM on May 9, 2017 [17 favorites]


So when someone argues that shaming leads to stress and ulcers and sadness,

What concerns me is not that it makes people with bad ideas butthurt but that the shaming can be part of the social identity construction process that makes bigots more bigoted and more belligerent. Unless the basic science of the psychology of identity formation is completely wrong, that's the only likely effect of shaming someone aggressively who might otherwise be more open to growth and reconsidering their beliefs.

I'm not arguing any of this is simple or straightforward, or comes with easy solutions, but shaming has a long ugly history of being abused and fostering a culture of selfloathing and generalized suspicion. Medieval and puritanical culture were dominated by shaming, casual social violence, and were eventually rejected on massive scales as oppressive and cruel cultures. The left historically has led the charge against shaming, punishment, and ostracision as useful methods of social policing. Who's left now to hold that hard won ground if not even the political left?
posted by saulgoodman at 5:17 AM on May 9, 2017 [8 favorites]


Regarding the Hypatia kerfuffle: this is not my area of academic expertise, but what I've been told by those in the know is that the Hypatia article comparing Dolezal's racial identity with trans identities was originally criticized privately - possibly initially as part of the peer review process, in fact? - for completely ignoring the entire field of critical race studies and academic work on social construction of race that dates back a century or so. Failure to conduct a proper literature search or place one's current work in context is usually frowned upon in academia, bringing up issues of academic integrity, and usually would be a pretty clear cause for a journal to reject a paper. In this case, the fact that the background work not cited in the Hypatia article has primarily been conducted by black scholars, possibly in combination with a desire for page clicks for the journal, seems to have been a factor in the editorial decision to accept and publish the controversial paper. I'm told that the public letter critiquing and opposing the article in question was published only after privately-expressed concerns were ignored by editorial staff. Which might provide some lesson about why or how we've ended up with call-out culture to those, like Friedersdorf and The Atlantic in general, who decry it vociferously....
posted by eviemath at 5:31 AM on May 9, 2017 [7 favorites]


A couple of points on shame that I don't think I've seen above:

1) Sometimes it doesn't matter how the "call out" or "call in" is framed or worded; privileged folk carry about them their own sense of entitlement to do whatever seems right to them, and get upset when informed that they did something wrong, and hurt someone else. Happened to me just last week. This is where the notion of "white fragility" comes in handy. And then because we know we are such good people, we do sulk and mutter and feel helpless and really gross and ashamed for a good bit -- feeling alternately like the worst people and like we were abused.

2) Most of the talk here and everywhere is about the bad impact of such "shaming" -- like it cannot make people better in the long run. We don't have a ton of empirical evidence about this, and my guess is it depends on sooooo many variables that it doesn't makes sense to draw conclusions about the terrible effects of this kind of thing in the short run.

In short, I don't know, but it would be good if as a culture when privileged folks make mistakes (even if we are just privileged in one particular context) we strove to just sit with the awareness that we aren't perfect and do better in the future. Maybe do a little (A LOT) of self-education, as well.

That's all we can do.
posted by allthinky at 5:46 AM on May 9, 2017 [4 favorites]


How did columnists eat before they were able to sell this article a dozen or so times a year?

Juggalo gathering pieces
posted by thelonius at 5:46 AM on May 9, 2017 [7 favorites]


Mod note: One deleted. Hey, sorry, but we're not having the Hypatia fight here, or more Rachel Dolezal /transracialism fighting. We just can't handle another one of these; and this post isn't about that specifically.
posted by taz (staff) at 6:08 AM on May 9, 2017 [1 favorite]


I propose a new term for what seems to be the actual problematic behavior here: pile-on culture.
posted by eviemath at 6:14 AM on May 9, 2017 [13 favorites]


privileged folk carry about them their own sense of entitlement to do whatever seems right to them, and get upset when informed that they did something wrong

This is why I advocate trying to be polite and helpful when calling people out on stuff. In a sense, you're trying to minimize the number of assholes in the interaction.

If it's an normally good person who just made a mistake and go straight to an angry confrontation, you're being an asshole and you're likely encouraging the other person to be an asshole back. 2 assholes total.

If you're nice about, you're not being an asshole and odds are good that they'll respond in kind. 0 assholes, yay! The nice part is that, if you're wrong about them being racist/sexist/discriminatory/etc. you can still have a productive conversation about it because there aren't any assholes around getting in the way.

If you're nice about it and they double down, get upset or angry, you're still not an asshole but they are and they're not just putting on their "asshole hat" to fight fire with fire, they're just always as asshole. I think it's still a good idea to remain calm and polite but you can drop whatever respect you might have for them and be firm. White fragility is bullshit and I'd tell them so. At the first sign someone is going to get upset that they've been called out on something I try to cut them off and coach them on how to be called out better.

Of course that's an ideal that greatly depends on context and there are plenty of times when I'm left wishing I would have said something or reacted differently (up to and including, "Man, I really should have said something.")

Nobody is asking for perfection, we're all just trying to do better.
posted by VTX at 6:26 AM on May 9, 2017 [4 favorites]


The article is pretty light and not especially empirical. Privileged people expressing sadness that they can't get away with being rude and offensive is like, OK, yeah, so what. But having said that, I fucking hate callout culture and I think it's very real in left circles. It is part of what keeps me out of more involvement in parts of the Bay Area queer activist scene.

On websites (including this one), when I see one person thoughtfully calling out a behavior, I see that as useful and important. But frequently there's a line of people, often people not directly impacted by the problematic statement or behavior, taking turns to call out the same person; I don't think that has much to do with changing someone's behavior. I see pile-ons as the ultimate virtue signaling, a way to define oneself within the group of righteous people, without actually effecting change in the other person. I've been in the weird situation of reading straight people standing up for gay issues in a way that I, a gay person, personally disagree with, to the point that I don't even want to be part of the conversation anymore.

I know someone who was shamed out of having a party because the theme of the party supposedly glorified an event that is harmful to certain domesticated animals. (As a fairly close analogy, imagine a farm themed party that was called out for sanctioning the abuse of chickens in battery cage conditions.) This is a very politically active person who takes a meaningful role in social justice movements. I'm a vegetarian (OK, pescatarian), but I think that's the stupidest shit I've ever heard.

On the periphery of my community, I can think of three people I know who were publicly accused of rape for behaviors which I do not define as rape or sexual assault. I obviously wasn't in the room, but how I heard the incidents described, from the point of view of the person stating they were assaulted, does not fit my understanding of those terms. This in my perception has to do with a culture where instead of saying, "I think this person is a dick, and we were in a really bad relationship", it is understood that the only way to define the interaction should be under terms of assault. There's no room for ambiguity or mutual shittiness in this framing.

I am very hesitant to make a blanket critique of left culture. There's a huge propaganda machine designed to accuse of being "Politically Correct" when we're actually doing the important work of identifying and changing harmful behaviors and norms. But I also think callout culture is real and sucks. I think we do need ways to change this.
posted by latkes at 8:07 AM on May 9, 2017 [14 favorites]


It means someone who is already tired is willing to extend me the benefit of the doubt that I will value then and listen to them. I try to not let them down

Thank you. That's perfect. Will try to keep my mindset here from now on.
posted by greermahoney at 8:34 AM on May 9, 2017 [2 favorites]


I just don't care what people think of me. I act accordingly and accept the consequences.
posted by judson at 8:54 AM on May 9, 2017


I propose a new term for what seems to be the actual problematic behavior here: pile-on culture.

I'll second that motion.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:00 AM on May 9, 2017


Mod note: Couple of comments deleted. Absolutely let's not take this in the direction of second-guessing rape claims. That is way, WAY not going to be productive here.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:02 AM on May 9, 2017 [6 favorites]


I recently put together a list of some recent links about inclusion for Geek Feminism, and a bunch of the articles that have to do with "call-out culture" and how we do responsibility within communities might be useful to you for the FPP, eviemath, or for others interested:

“Looking back on a decade in online fandom social justice: unexpurgated version”, by sqbr: “And just because I’m avoiding someone socially doesn’t mean I should ignore what they have to say, and won’t end up facing complex ethical choices involving them. My approach right now is to discuss it with people I trust. Figuring out who those people are, and learning to make myself vulnerable in front of them, has been part of the journey.”

"Towards a More Welcoming War" by Mary Anne Mohanraj (originally published in WisCon Chronicles 9: Intersections and Alliances, Aqueduct Press, 2015): "This is where I start thinking about what makes an effective community intervention. This is where I wish I knew some people well enough to pick up a phone."

"The chemistry of discourse", by Abi Sutherland: "What we really need for free speech is a varied ecosystem of different moderators, different regimes, different conversations. How do those spaces relate to one another when Twitter, Reddit, and the chans flatten the subcultural walls between them?"

"Hot Allostatic Load", by porpentine, in The New Inquiry: "This is about disposability from a trans feminine perspective, through the lens of an artistic career. It’s about being human trash"..."Call-out Culture as Ritual Disposability"

"The Ethics of Mob Justice", by Sady Doyle, in In These Times: "But, again, there's no eliminating the existence of Internet shaming, even if you wanted to—and if you did, you'd eliminate a lot of healthy dialogue and teachable moments right along with it. At best, progressive people who recognize the necessity of some healthy shame can only alter the forms shaming takes."
posted by brainwane at 9:12 AM on May 9, 2017 [14 favorites]


People should try to do better, but that includes the people calling out.

I used to think that people who bristled at the term privilege were being defensive and paranoid when they interpreted it as a personal attack, and I would argue that it was just a thing they needed to be aware of in their interactions, not a crime or a personal failing. But then I started seeing people using it as a personal attack, and often being dismissive of anything they didn't like with the blanket assumption that the person they disagreed with must be wrong because of some social justice type of reason, rather than just having a different perspective or experience. I know that I've been accused of having privileges I objectively do not seemingly just because someone didn't like what I was saying, and I've seen other people I know being inaccurately 'accused' of being white or male or whatever, too, so it happens for sure.

I have seen the argument that the people doing the calling out mean well and hey, that's better than not trying at all, but I don't buy that. There's a lot of projection involved in that, and a failure to acknowledge that other people's experiences are different from yours, and yeah, a lot of the time that's (ironically!) tied to their own privileges. When someone casually 'accuses' someone of having a specific type of privilege or perspective without any real evidence, it's a fairly safe bet that it's pure projection.

And I can give an example. A while back, there was a really pretty facile article posted here about a usability topic. I am not an academic and usability is not my whole job, but it's always been a pretty big chunk of it, so I pointed out that the solution in this case was misguided, as it was sort of presenting a single solution based on a few anecdotal cases, and in my (fairly extensive) experience, there is no such thing as a holy grail of usability, because your audience consists of a lot of different people with different needs and abilities, many of which require mutually exclusive accommodations. And I got "called out" by some guy who thought that Hmmmm, it sounds like I'm pulling this wholesale out of my ass and manufacturing scenarios in which some fictional other disabled person is in conflict with the others. The other disabled people were not fictional, and these are very basic, fundamental tenets of creating usable interfaces, which I would have been happy to explain if someone had bothered asking rather than indulging in a kneejerk accusation of making shit up.

I'd obviously done a fair amount of reading on the subject, I've taken classes, and I built a set of development tools to help people create usable interfaces. But hey, someone had a kneejerk reaction to some aspect of what I was saying about mutually exclusive accommodations and "called me out" using an argument that has the superficial appearance of a virtuous position to take.

Thing is, I probably could have gone tit-for-tat on him and pointed out that a relatively ignorant man was 'splaining something to me that I obviously know a lot more about than he does. That's a pretty common feature of my entire life and career, but I don't have any reason to believe that he even knew I was a woman, so that wouldn't have been a fair criticism. I'm pretty sure he was just projecting his level of knowledge onto me, rather than it being specifically gendered. But also, because of my lengthy experience with that sort of thing, I have a very thick skin about being presumed to be incompetent, and I have a general policy where I don't even bother trying to defend my competence to randos on the internet. It's probably significant that I don't have a social investment in Metafilter, so it just kind of pissed me off. If I had been socially invested, though, something like that would have been really painful, and that's why I think it's important to be thoughtful with callouts and to actually examine the assumptions you're making about someone before you accuse them of some nefarious or ignorant motivation.

And I'm not going to try to play it like you've lost this incredibly valuable asset or anything, because in that case, I'm not an actual expert on usability, just an OK-ly informed practitioner. But I know I knew more about that topic than that guy, and probably most of the people in that thread.

I'm not special. I have zero doubt that there are a lot of other people who have thrown up their hands and peaced out of discussions that they could have contributed to but didn't want to invest the time (or in some cases, the social investment) to ensure that some sloppy reader couldn't misconstrue anything.
posted by ernielundquist at 9:34 AM on May 9, 2017 [16 favorites]


Oh, hell yeah. Just for the record, I do that all the time here too. There are whole categories of topics I don't even look at here because they're always shitty.

I don't think either of us can estimate how many posts don't get made for one reason vs. another, but both of those things happen.
posted by ernielundquist at 10:11 AM on May 9, 2017


brainwane, any chance you could post that comment on the front page?
posted by tobascodagama at 10:17 AM on May 9, 2017


eviemath: I just saw tobascodagama's comment, but would like to defer to you since you mentioned working on a related FPP. Is the kind of stuff I mentioned suitable to your focus, or should I go make a new & different FPP?
posted by brainwane at 10:46 AM on May 9, 2017


Surprised to see zero instances of the word "bullying" in this thread. As far as I can tell, the Williamsburg Hair Man incident is plain old bullying, just online. Someone publicly points and laughs at someone else's appearance and others join in. It has been around for a lot longer than social media or even political correctness.

Calling out ostensibly serves some higher purpose. Are there discernible reasons why it sometimes takes a form similar to bullying, or slides into bullying, or maybe is inspired by bullying motivations? If there are reasons, are they technologically-mediated? Probably, but I'm skeptical that any real answers lie in that direction.

Or are people just bullies?
posted by nequalsone at 11:02 AM on May 9, 2017 [4 favorites]


Something that I've been noticing lately that sort of weirds me out is the way people sometimes call out a certain statement or action on behalf of another (usually less privileged) group that they don't belong to, and then they completely dismiss and ignore any members of the actual group if those people come forward and say things that the original people don't agree with.

I know, for example, that a single person saying, "Well, I belong to that group, but I'm not offended by that statement," doesn't automatically make something not offensive, but it is still deeply weird sometimes to see people--who don't belong to that group themselves--responding to comments like that with answers that basically boil down to: "Your experience and opinion don't count for the following reasons..."
posted by colfax at 11:05 AM on May 9, 2017 [13 favorites]


eviemath: I just saw tobascodagama's comment, but would like to defer to you since you mentioned working on a related FPP. Is the kind of stuff I mentioned suitable to your focus, or should I go make a new & different FPP?

I feel no ownership of the topic, and am happy to let others take on the work of FPP crafting. I'd add the Black Girl Dangerous links on calling in. There's an IWW article about bad jacketing, though I got a 503 error when looking it up earlier. Rebecca Solnit has also written about activist community, and there's increasingly more on that topic in modern anarchist (especially anarcha-feminist and what I guess you could call intersectional anarchism, eg. black anarchism) circles. To me, call-out (or pile-on) culture is a subset of the broader issue of how we create or maintain community within social justice movements, and what sort of community we create. So debates around so-called identity politics versus single-minded Marxism, or prefigurative politics versus focusing on the revolution first and building the replacement afterwards, are also part of this broader discussion.

In particular, I see call-out/pile-on culture as being in the same vein as issues around accusations of people selling out in punk scenes. I may be totally off base in my understanding of the phenomenon of pile-on culture - I don't actually see a lot of it in my particular circles (call outs, sometimes, but less than you might imagine, mixed well with call-ins, and not often leading to pile ons), am not particularly on tumblr or twitter, etc., so mostly hear about it second-hand - but in my limited experience it seems to mostly be promulgated by people who are more culturally involved with a social justice movement than possessed of a clear and nuanced political understanding (though, am I contributing to the problem with such a broad statement?). From my political perspective, cultural involvement with lesser political understanding isn't an insult: punk culture was an entry point to political anarchism for a lot of people, lots of people came to Vietnam War opposition in the late '60s and early '70s because they liked the music, etc. It's incumbent on organized groups within social justice movements to use that entry point more effectively. Also, strong social movements that can sustain themselves over time are either based in established communities (civil rights movements, landless peasants movements, Zapatistas, etc.) or develop a supportive community of resistance in parallel with the political work of the movement (eg. some labor organizing among diverse immigrant communities united only by common labor issues, some of the lgbtq rights organizing historically, etc.). So that cultural connection is important and shouldn't be thrown out wholesale because of problems with call-out or pile-on culture in social movements that are not based exclusively in pre-existing communities, where the potential for policing of community membership exists.

My ideal FPP would thus include enough background links to describe this broader context of how to create community around social movements that are not based in pre-existing communities, and how to ensure that our communities of resistance reflect and support the political goals of our movements. But I don't have time to research that FPP this week, so please do make your own FPP, with whatever focus it ends up having, as you so desire!
posted by eviemath at 11:38 AM on May 9, 2017 [9 favorites]


Calling out ostensibly serves some higher purpose. Are there discernible reasons why it sometimes takes a form similar to bullying, or slides into bullying, or maybe is inspired by bullying motivations? If there are reasons, are they technologically-mediated? Probably, but I'm skeptical that any real answers lie in that direction.

It's bullying people into thinking differently, for a good cause. Nothing more or less.
posted by Sebmojo at 2:35 PM on May 9, 2017


FWIW, all the best science says it will do exactly the opposite of change their minds.
posted by saulgoodman at 3:39 PM on May 9, 2017 [5 favorites]


I really admire people who can graciously accept criticism and privately, introspectively manage their hurt at being called out. It is a skill that I hope to develop and refine throughout my life.

Many, many people just aren't there yet, though, so harsh and pointed criticism runs the risk of bouncing off several defensive layers unless introduced in a gentle, ingratiating way that acknowledges commonalities and assumes good faith.

Is this pandering to, for example, white fragility? Yes. But is it a valid tactic for making practical inroads with people? Also yes, I would argue.
posted by delight at 5:07 PM on May 9, 2017 [1 favorite]


Er, ostracism...

I've had the best luck sidling up to people I know and instead of lecturing them, or coming at them from the position of a better, making it personal, not being preachy but conversational, speaking as an equal, showing them some of the impacts in relation to my own or other real people's lives. There's places for confrontation that work. Like when it's directed at the truly powerful. But when ordinary, not particularly privileged along every axis people start policing and publicly mob shaming each other, that doesn't help anybody. That's just a more self-righteous flavored game of crabs in a barrel.
posted by saulgoodman at 6:29 PM on May 9, 2017 [4 favorites]


Is there a reason why you're not linking all that science here? I don't believe you.

This isn't malicious of him, I remember the despair-inducing FPP a while back. Essentially countering people in certain ways activates their amygdala and causes them to entrench in their completely wrong beliefs. It's horrible but real.
posted by corb at 7:43 PM on May 9, 2017 [3 favorites]


I remember the despair-inducing FPP a while back.

It was to this, just last week.
posted by lunasol at 8:19 PM on May 9, 2017 [1 favorite]


It's not callout culture, per se, but the personally dismissive and contemptuous forms calling out takes when people do it online to basically powerless people. When you make criticisms about who people are along dimensions they can't change, like making claims about women or other groups as a class on the basis of aspects of social identity that can't be changed through conscious effort, it doesn't come across as well meaning criticism, it just causes people to disengage and feel the core of who they are is being attacked unfairly. Note, that's absolutely not the same thing as "speaking truth to power" or using confrontation as an effective tool for fostering longer term change. It's especially hurtful and damaging when it looks hypocritical, as when other white people speak on behalf of other groups as if they see themselves as an exceptional case, uniquely capable of transcending racism to be able to speak about it as if they weren't actively participating in it and benefiting from it too in subtle and not so subtle ways.
posted by saulgoodman at 5:56 AM on May 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


Tl;dr: if you believe identity is partly socially constructed, as leftists have long argued, then how you relate to others plays a major role in shaping their sense of identity. Just sniping and piling on and dismissing people online may seem like small potatoes, but it can have big effects in distorting the social aspect of psychological identity formation processes, especially when it comes to people who already have weak or unstable core identity constructs.
posted by saulgoodman at 6:01 AM on May 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


Also, there has long been the argument, when challenged, that call-outs aren't intended to just bully people, but are to indicate and educate people about the mistake they've made, so they don't make it again and learn from the experience.

So if a bunch of scientific studies come along to suggest that attacking and insulting people is the least effective method of getting them to change their behaviour and thought processes, let alone being backed up by frequent anecdotal experience, then you'd think that to those whose claim is call-outs are beneficial might rethink their strategy.

Because callout culture is harder to stand behind if you understand that callouts don't work to actually make things better, to change toxic views or improve behaviours of those being called out. If they are only effective in making those performing the callouts, those enthusiastic about naming and shaming, feel good about themselves. If the notion that they are making things better becomes a pretense, then so much of callout culture becomes much, much harder to defend.
posted by gadge emeritus at 9:05 AM on May 10, 2017 [6 favorites]


I think they are more intended to scare people away from subjects than educate. And yeah, that comes with a cost of blowback.
posted by Artw at 9:28 AM on May 10, 2017 [2 favorites]


Whenever I get concerned about the amplifying effects of social media, call-out culture, performative outrage, shaming, pile-ons, ally theater, echo chambers, musical fainting couches, circular firing squads, etc, I start to wonder about the role of jargon itself in propagating these phenomena.

Internet witticisms are fun and cathartic, but we're saturated with them. Critical theory is a valuable tool, but we're blunting it with overuse. It's thrilling to discover there's a name for a feeling or experience you've never been able to express before, but when you've got a shiny new hammer, everything looks like a nail. Too much jargon encourages lazy thinking. Over time, it makes people susceptible to demagoguery and mob behavior.

I'd love to institute "Jargon-free Fridays," one day each week when we challenge our peers to express their ideas with as few neologisms, cliches (see above), abstractions, slogans and catch-phrases as possible. I have no idea if a campaign like this would have any effect on the way kids treat each other online or activists behave on campus, but I'd feel better for trying.
posted by ducky l'orange at 10:59 AM on May 10, 2017 [8 favorites]


Well, at least one good thing came out of this article, in that Conor Friedersdorf appears to have reconsidered his position on the utility of safe spaces within college settings. So that's nice.
posted by Errant at 12:15 PM on May 10, 2017 [3 favorites]


I'd love to institute "Jargon-free Fridays," one day each week when we challenge our peers to express their ideas with as few neologisms, cliches (see above), abstractions

I'd push back against this - because many of the words people would call "jargon" were coined because they filled a gap. They represent a need. There are many, many words coined since postmodernism that needed to exist because there was no other succinct way to speak what had before been unspeakable, represent what was difficult to describe, or encapsulate what was sprawling. Even the discussion over which words are "jargon" would, I suspect, reveal an unwillingness to grant the existence of an idea, rather than a simple irritation at neologisms.
posted by Miko at 12:40 PM on May 10, 2017 [7 favorites]


Even the discussion over which words are "jargon" would, I suspect, reveal an unwillingness to grant the existence of an idea, rather than a simple irritation at neologisms.

I am very willing to grant the existence, relevance and urgency of these ideas.
posted by ducky l'orange at 1:07 PM on May 10, 2017


What I mean is, your jargon might be my name, my identity or my significant concern.

It's a little hard to argue in the abstract, because I have no way of knowing what you think is "jargon."
posted by Miko at 2:14 PM on May 10, 2017 [4 favorites]


Jargon is usually coined because it's necessary. But some words are "doing a lot of work" so to speak, and sometimes people don't agree on them and end up just arguing past each other and getting angrier and angrier. In my experience, it truly can be productive to temporarily avoid the use of certain terms, especially ones that people define differently or are very emotionally charged. It can actually help people understand each other better.

Emphasis on temporary -- the idea is not that these words are useless or need to be retired or something. Just it can be a useful exercise to avoid certain terms in a specific discussion.

(like, probably this discussion here would have gone differently without the use of the word "call-out culture". people use it a lot of different ways and it does seem to result in confusion.)
posted by vogon_poet at 2:28 PM on May 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


Mainly it seems like a way to have a fight instead of a meaningful conversation in an area already fraught with ways to have fights instead of meaningful conversations.
posted by Artw at 3:52 PM on May 10, 2017 [5 favorites]


Pretty much what Vogon_Poet said.

Specialized, technical language originating from a specific knowledge community (in this case critical theory emerging largely from the social sciences and popularlized by activists both on and off the internet) is useful and necessary within these communities. It is not bad. If we got rid of it we'd need to invent it again out of sheer necessity. But it is wise to use it sparingly when attempting to engage different communities of interpretation, and to avoid using it as a cudgel.
posted by ducky l'orange at 3:58 PM on May 10, 2017 [2 favorites]


That makes sense, 23skidoo. Stepping away.
posted by ducky l'orange at 4:23 PM on May 10, 2017




And Counterpunch continues its rectocranial inversion.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:11 AM on May 24, 2017


New on the front page per encouragement from tobascodagama and eviemath: "Distinguishing character assassination from accountability", a link roundup based on my comment from May 9th.
posted by brainwane at 7:17 AM on June 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


Fantastic! Can't wait to read it.
posted by tobascodagama at 8:16 AM on June 8, 2017


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