I truly believe that one day we as a website will make it out of the darkness of weird arbitrary "complicity" moralism and into the sunny daylight in between "the thing you do is connected to something/someone bad" and "the thing you do itself is a bad thing"
99% of the time someone uses the word “complicit”, they are trying to be rhetorically powerful, rather than analytically useful. The only way to be non-complicit is to obey their demand, and little room for for thought or response. It’s why prosecutors love using the framing.
Complicity is the reason bystander obligations got mostly thrown out a long time ago. It is not practical to demand on pain of punishment that everyone leap to rescue in situations they’re just nearby to.
The tricky thing is that it's baked into the DNA of every Twitter alternative. Bouiegate overshadowed it but there was also a round of discourse yesterday about Black Twitter and the "Nazi bar" argument, another conflict that reduces to the same elements.
Yeah, a really set in part of internet politics left of center I think. not really sure what could challenge it, other than people having to square it with a power map of their own activity (given that you also often see posts applying this logic to decisions about consumption and not just labor)
I would like it if a silver lining of this was a deeper understanding that good people can work for problematic institutions and that’s ok actually, good even.
