Lauren, cool article questioning cancel culture, thanks for posting, but as a technologist I bristle a little when “the internet” is blamed for some negative things, when actually the net effect, the sharing of information is positive.

It is a particular form of internet which is negative, due to network architecture which is driven by a need to derive profit from the infrastructure by the network providers.

A server provided to make profit, does that most effectively when it routes all traffic between all users via itself. This is so that it can sniff all conversations, to spot direct advertising opportunities, and who is triggered by what, to see which things are virally popular, thus maximising opportunities of click based revenue.

All connections between users are generally reserved to only those which users select to open themselves, via “friending”, following, and etc, since each path takes bandwidth, which costs money in server resources.

So, assisted by machine intelligence algos, the above architecture results in social bubbles, confirmation bias, and automatic suppression of alternate views, as well as only offering a very small fraction of the possible connectivity to other users, that the internet should provide in theory.

It is the lost connectivity that needs to be recognised as the problem, since the result of only seeing a selected fraction of the truth, rather than the whole truth, gives a high probability that the information needed to complete a narrative can be made up by users passing information on, sometimes without even realising it, thus creating a fertile environment for things like cancellation culture.

Cancellation culture is just another form of reducing connectivity.

In other words, more connectivity is good, less connectivity is bad.

Hence the reason we see all of the establishments both East and West doing what they can to try to limit connectivity, by resisting things like 5G, cancelling alternative media sources like Tik Tok etc.

Connectivity has already become a thorn in their side, it prevents the wool being pulled over our eyes, because now we are seeing more than just our own establishment narrative.

So, we shouldn’t look for less connectivity, but more.

This would have a positive effect on cancellation culture, making it less of a thing in the future.

Sometime, hopefully very soon, we will dispense with the scourge of profit in the network.

All in all, the internet is good, but it could be better.