Cancel Culture and flaws in design principles from Hated In The Nation (Black Mirror)
After a few hours of failing to watch another shit anime with Vrishin and Rohaan -- ahem, Tensai Ouji no Akaji Kokka Saisei Jutsu-- we somehow made our way to Black Mirror. (Hated In The Nation S3E6).
Like all Black Mirror episodes, there is a huge emphasis on the negative externalities of technology and it forces the audience to think intensely on ethics and reflect on how we transition to the future.
What is Hated In The Nation about? It's a commentary on cancel culture and the consequences of the words we say online.
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After finishing Klosterman's book on villainy, I'm inclined to think that Shaun Li is the also villain. As the government insider who is actively involved in the murder cases, he knows the most from both sides and still does the least. He knows that the bees are used to spy on the public through photographic lenses and can easily surmise the massive national security threat of a mega-hack. Li's case for wresting power and control for the people ended up creating the vulnerability which killed 370,000 of them.
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The strongest narratives are told with symbolism, metaphors, and blood. Massive problems cause mass awareness. It'll rarely be the other way around because if it's not hurting anyone -- who gives a flip.
In a terrible way, I found myself pondering more deeply into the main villain's (Garrett Scholes) methods. They were effective and unforgettable... to the point where I'm sure that internet hate and cancel culture standards of that episode's world would be changed forever. Maybe they'd taking subtler, crueler forms or maybe it might have been actually solved. Who knows.
Garret's methods
The one thing that has stayed constant in our beloved species over the eons is our human nature; even the best of coders can't hack that away. Garret chose to exploit a terrible part of human nature that people are almost universally aware of through children's bed-time stories.
Mature people understand that humans are how we are and there's no changing it. You can make us conform and you can give us principles/ethics, but taken at scale, it's easier to show the worst sides of ourselves because hate is easy and stronger to spread.
Great engineers find ways to design around our fundamental flaws. It's an advanced principle of human-centered design. Garret became fixated on the source of the problem (the human) and painted a tale with the blood of 370,000 people who fed into their inner-nature.
Garret's method was to incite hate on Twitter by actively promote the #DeathTo hashtag through bot accounts.
Note how he's already purposely focusing on the shittyness of human tendencies. That's like stealing a 5 year old's favorite toy and justifying how you think they're inherently spoiled when he/she starts bawling (definitely have never used that logic before in any case, ever). Point being, it's not fair -- he's baiting human shityness on a mass scale.
As my classical studies professor once wisely said, "Civility is the bedrock of society; without it, we are nothing but animals." Although I think we're still very ape-like about our behavior even in a civilized-society (digression: lol that's why we have economics and finance as monkey sciences), I believe in the point. Sure, you can make a point that people remember today and feel terrible about like Garret, but that type of awareness does little in the long-term to limit the terrifying negative externalities of human nature. Those can only be done through civility, society, and heavily principled design-thinking that takes into account the worst of human shityness.
Garret, I respect the grind and I know the outcome was probably effective. But I hate it. There has to be a better way.