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Notes -
I think one core idea here is that it used to be the case that a company could get reputational damage. But nowadays it seems like these cases are less and less “organic”. (Dovetails a bit with less organic virality in general). Like maybe in the past someone who got spontaneously famous would need to be cut loose. But when groups dedicate time to hunting down each and every offender? That’s just morality police, empowered with governmental-adjacent power, but without governmental guardrails. A bad state of affairs.
There’s also some conflation of what makes you a good human (don’t celebrate murder) vs what is human but shows a lack of tact (expressing true feelings of ambivalence about a murder) vs what is human but normally acceptable (half-private venting on supposed friend networks) vs what is possibly not even a genuine value statement at all (people feel “out of control” of the political trajectory and sometimes cope poorly with that feeling, saying things they may not truly mean in the heat of the moment).
And celebrities are already subject to a degree of dehumanization: Taylor Swift, Korean idols, etc all have people way up in their personal lives and even normal fans can display at times sociopathic tendencies and expressions. If you have Kirk in the mental bucket of “celebrity” and not “father to two young children” of course your conduct will be different! Frankly no one got fired if they celebrate Michael Jackson dying, whether they thought he was a creep and a predator, or a misunderstood star with a broken childhood. Yet politics, we are told, is different. That’s a little true (threatening democratic processes is more long term destabilizing to future democratic processes), but it’s not completely true!
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