Such a rule would allow unparalleled interference by bosses into our private lives - policing not just the things we say outside of work, but the things we enjoy. More from this author The case for the sexual revolution The comedy you laugh at, the music you listen to, the art you hang on your walls at home: any of these things might grate against the sensibilities of a coworker, especially one who is in the habit of opportunistic offence-taking. It is not hard to identify the flaws, and the threat, of a workplace policy founded on the notion that one’s employers should be meting out punishments, firings and fines, over matters of taste. What kind of person finds a joke like that funny? A woman-disrespecter, that’s who! And having telegraphed his true disposition toward his female colleagues, surely the person in question is unfit to remain employed. The mask has slipped, the jig is up, the retweet is not just a retweet but a revelation. Never mind the countless positive interactions amassed over the course of a 20-year career. Never mind that the man in question has worked with and mentored women who loudly attest to his decency. Consider how suspicious one has to be, how consumed by paranoid cynicism, to see a veteran reporter retweet an off-colour joke and declare it not an isolated error in judgment, but a definitive glimpse of the darkness that lurks inside his heart. More from this author The media is run by trollsĮvery one of these meltdowns, from the dad with the can opener to the reporter with an ax to grind, owes its existence to an ongoing erosion of interpersonal trust. And then, within days, we moved on - our appetite for drama sated, but the point thoroughly missed. The immolation of Sonmez’s career seemed simultaneously inevitable and impossible, right up until the moment when it happened. How could they possibly fire her? How could they possibly not? The unherd series#All this, combined with a series of leaks from inside the increasingly-exasperated Washington Post leadership apparatus, built to a climax as hotly-debated as the series finale of LOST. The unherd full#We watched the action like a TV show: the callout, the apology, the suspension of the colleague (for a full month without pay) when the apology was deemed insufficient, the escalating demands from Sonmez (who not only supported Weigel’s suspension, but wanted everyone who publicly criticised her public criticism to be professionally sanctioned as well). (When John Roderick, now better known as Bean Dad, tried to create a teachable moment by getting his daughter to work out the machinations of a can opener without help, internet scolds were so incensed that they reported him to Child Protective Services.) This type of projection is intrinsic to such online controversies: nobody ever makes a one-off mistake, everything is part of pattern. Some claimed that it signalled the hidden sexism of the reporter, Dave Weigel, who retweeted it others, including Sonmez, insisted that it was symbolic of a deep-seated culture of misogyny in the Washington Post itself. The problem was what it represented: the mere tip of an imagined vast, sexist iceberg lurking below the surface. What quickly became clear, however, is that the joke was not the point. The offensiveness (or entertainment value) of the joke itself is a matter of taste. Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez waged a six-day war of attrition over a colleague’s retweet of an off-colour joke. Granted, some characters make this drama more riveting than others, and last week’s iteration was a peak example of the form. We obsess over the individual characters - the Bean Dad, the Racist Cheerleader, the Guy Who Didn’t Cum On His Cat (the internet remains unpersuaded) - yet fail to grasp that they’re all starring in the same self-perpetuating tragedy. What we miss is that the details hardly matter, as individually fascinating as they may be indeed, a large part of this problem is that we only ever talk about it in terms of its most recent iteration. The splatter of drama, the rush to consume, the way we pick over every last sordid detail of the controversy until there’s no meat left. The unherd free#It’s an apt metaphor for what happens during one of the public meltdowns that double as free entertainment for the extremely online. Picture the ants discovering the mess, swarming over it, drunk on the abundance in front of them - and far too preoccupied with their feasting to ever look up at the tree it fell from. The unherd skin#Picture a huge, poisonous fruit falling to the ground, its skin splitting open, the rancid pulp pouring out.
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