The irony of the democratization of critical theory has been that it has dramatically moved to a confusion of the principals for the principles. This is why deplatforming doesn't work despite what seems like impeccable logic, the premises are confused. To use Joanne and genocide as an example, they confuse Joanne (the person) for the genocide (the idea) and thus misplace the locus of the power they seek to break with deplatforming. The double irony is that Foucault (albeit somewhat shakily) understood this and he targeted institutions as the embodiment of ideas, not specific people. (The others big names were more hit and miss in this regard, especially Marcuse who still remained not ignorant enough to not believe that his deplatforming scheme wouldn't require mass violence and oppression across every aspect of society.) These new "theorists" or "activists", like Nepenthe or ResetERA.com in general, are so superficially focused on singular non-complex surface concepts (Shader Model 2.0) and so ignorant of power (and history and ideas and etc.) that they seem to literally believe eliminating (perhaps through shotgunning) a person eliminates the power. Thus we just have to ban Joanne from Twitter (or Milo or Trump or Alex Jones or etc.) and the genocide vanishes because the totem of power is gone. This is also why they seem to believe that taking down a website or changing an algorithm mass deradicalizes people by not just somehow killing the idea but also inverting all studies of radicalization that show oppression increases it. (This is why, for example, many starting with John Adams argued that George III created America. George III believed he faced a malicious conspiracy duping the masses creating an existential conflict that required him to reject any attempts at compromise or moderation. Which led him into a decision tree that created further unity among the disparate colonists around increasingly radical ideas.) You would think people would be more open to considering second order effects and rejecting the idea that putting something out of immediate deliberate sight eliminates it considering how early humans, and most animals, develop object permanence.
It's literally objectifying and fetishizing in the proper sense of the terms.
It's literally objectifying and fetishizing in the proper sense of the terms.
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