Does X mark the spot? “Having come up in the ’90s, and very online, myself, I feel the pull of this argument. Online discourse, unconstrained by politesse, by editorial standards, by antiquated mores, and by boring restraint, is thrilling and heady. It can even feel daring and heroic, all wild abandon and the toppling of sacred cows. On the internet, expertise is instantaneous; we all perform in exaggerated avatars of ourselves, which only reinforces the cultural message that more speech (never mind what speech) is always better, and that the individual—not editors, publications, collectives, contemporary mores, or social solidarity—is the final arbiter of value, accuracy, and decency. There is also something regressive and a bit adolescent about this sort of thinking, as though all the cancel culture complainers long for are evenings at the debate club and late-night rap sessions full of grand philosophical gestures and free from the grotty pressures of real life. It may be why so many cancel culture critics are fixated on the college campuses they themselves have long since left. The concession and compromises of adulthood are rarely as fun or as heroic as the caffeinated debates of their youth, when they could say and do almost anything, parked in a beanbag chair in a red-brick dorm.”

This is a pretty decent article, though I wish it went deeper in the topic. In general though, it’s still not sufficiently appreciated just how much the 90s loom in these ridiculous debates. As the article points out later, there’s a real “dorm room bs” quality to all this. Which I guess is appealing to a certain stripe of carefree pseudointellectual, but if you actually care about substance, then these amateur socratic diatribes ring especially hollow.

>"How the 1990s created a group of thinkers obsessed with cancel culture"