Nothing Happened to Zoe Kravitz
approaching two decades of mass participation in social networks, people continue to instill them with power they don't have
After the incident that must not be named, actress Zoe Kravitz made some innocuous criticisms on Instagram, writing “here's a picture of my dress at the award show where we are apparently assaulting people on stage now” and “here is a picture of my dress at the party after the award show - where we are apparently screaming profanities and assaulting people on stage now.” Some people on social media really didn’t like this, I guess because they had a different take on the incident that must not be named. Because there is no such thing as an appropriate and restrained level of criticism on the internet, people insisted that Kravitz was now the devil, and they took to intentionally misrepresenting a lighthearted interview she gave about Jaden Smith almost a decade ago to accuse her of being a “groomer,” which has surpassed “toxic” and “gaslighting” as the internet’s favorite meaningless pejorative. What happened next was a particularly weird kind of delusion we get in the digital age, the notion that wealthy and famous people can be hurt by the mass indignation of normies on social media.
The imbroglio I’m referring to was a phenomenon of social media, mostly Twitter, but this Buzzfeed News (lol) recap summarizes the backlash effectively, including the strange assumption that the mass outrage was somehow a major challenge for Kravitz. There are many, many more - Mia Mercado at the Cut, Leah Bitsky at Page Six, Charlotte Dean for the DailMail, and on and on. And they take as given that this is all something that genuinely threatens Kravitz in some real way. Reena Gupta wrote that “I will say is that it’s rare to see people go from being completely enamoured by a celebrity to straight-up appalled, so quickly…. Zoë Kravitz went from hero to zero in just a few short days.”
How is Zoe Kravitz weathering this storm? Let’s check the headlines.
Zoë Kravitz Looks Rejuvenated on ELLE Canada's May 2022 Cover
Kimi: Zoe Kravitz mesmerises in Steven Soderbegh's smart, snappy Covid thriller
Exclusive: Joaquin Phoenix And Zoe Kravitz Eyed For Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde Movie
Channing Tatum and Zoe Kravitz’s zodiac signs equal sexual chemistry
Zoe Kravitz goes incognito in a trench coat and baseball cap during casual coffee run in Manhattan
Truly, the woman is a pariah. Kravitz, for her part, seemed to respond to the backlash by posting the following tweet to Instagram, which I think was the right tone.
This kind of serial overestimation of the retributive power of social media is particularly common when it comes to “Black Twitter.” Like so many other things Black people make or do, Black Twitter has been invested with totemic powers by white people. But what is Black Twitter ever going to do, really? Make fun of people, just like all the rest of Twitter does, all that Twitter does. And making fun of people makes nothing happen. A similar dynamic happened a few months back when Jane Campion made a joke that was kinda sorta at the expense of Venus and Serena Williams. She made the requisite apology, but if she hadn’t, so what? Would she have stopped being a respected and influential filmmaker? What could Twitter really do to her?
This is all sensitive to me, in particular, because so much of the American socialist left seems to think that posting is doing politics. There’s a visibility bias, of course, as it’s a lot easier to observe the young leftists tweeting 24/7 than it is to observe the dedicated organizers putting in the IRL gruntwork every day. Still, I will never not become depressed at the number of people on the radical left in this era who seem to have no ambitions greater than getting a few thousand strangers to tepidly laugh at their shitty jokes. Here, the dynamic might be almost reversed: I suspect that these leftists tweet so much not because they think tweeting gives them power but because they are convinced that the real world never will. Change seems impossible, so let’s tell jokes.
Now, you might rush to say that this post contradicts my past statements about canceling and why I think it’s often bad. For the record I’ve never been against the idea that some people sometimes need social disapproval; rather I’ve always been for the concept of proportionality, that the size of the punishment should fit the size of the crime. Expressing her totally unremarkable opinion on the incident that must not be named should not have resulted in attempted character assassination of Zoe Kravitz, as that punishment does not fit the “crime,” even if you believe it was the wrong thing to say. But more importantly, as I frequently say the fact that the consequences of canceling are so fickle and so subject to power dynamics is not a defense of canceling but the opposite. Had Kravitz not been rich and powerful she might well have faced actual material consequences from the pile-on. As she is rich and powerful, she won’t. This does not strike me as a ringing endorsement of the liberatory power of canceling. And examples people give of canceling working almost always turn out to actually be the hand of powerful institutions at play. People say canceling worked with Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, but those guys actually went to jail. That’s just not the same.
Since the internet became a mass phenomenon in the mid-90s or so, there’s been this committed effort to see the technology as a revolutionary tool, an effort to almost will into being new political possibilities owing to digital interconnectivity. During the Arab Spring the press was filled with breathless claims that social media had created that movement, all facts to the contrary. And with Twitter in particular you see this dogged insistence that simply by creating an audience for regular people there’s some sort of egalitarian power at play. But 20 years after MySpace began the first real social media craze, I think it’s safe to say that the jury has come back in: social media can’t make anything happen. It can occasionally ruin the life of individuals, almost none of them powerful or rich, but it can’t create any structural change. How could it ever? Sure, a completely random regular person can suddenly have an audience in the hundreds of thousands on Twitter, if things break right. But so what?
The real tragedy of Twitter is that kids no longer pick "mind reading" as the superpower they wish they had because if someone is on Twitter you already know everything they're thinking and it's usually boring or dumb or mean.
jonathan haidt has a good article on all this in the Atlantic today. He parses the effects of cancel culture on non-famous, non-powerful people and how that is affecting social cohesion and democracy. he spreads a far wider net as well. It's a good article but ends with the usual pleas for government to do something to ameliorate the harms of social media . . . though he does make the good point that it really comes down to us in our millions using our own inherent genius and innovation to directly deal with problems we are aware of in the places we live. (Like filling potholes in streets when the city won't do it, as a very simple example.)
As usual Freddie reveals the problem with the progressive, young leftists. They can not tell the difference between enacting true social change and making posts. Haidt traces this not only to social media but to them being a generation of children exposed to over protection, not being able to play outside without supervision, or walk to school on their own, and so on. Their lament, that words are violence, that ideas are physically harmful, and so on come directly out of that way of thinking and parenting. It is a problem facilitated by both the left and the right for decades. They have been raised in bubbles and in consequence their social immune systems never developed.
I used to believe (based on some flawed sort of historical awareness) that the 60s in our time would come once more from the left (as it had in the 60s and the 20s). But it isn't and is not going to. those times were notable by large social protest movements that directly worked for structural change and identifiable outcomes (unions, women's right to vote, end the war, civil rights). They also were accompanied by great movements in art, literature, music, and comedy. It was clear then that the powerful, the rich, and the corporations were a problem and people set out to limit their power. We are not living in such a time. it is regrettably far more similar to the era prior to the civil war when social cohesion devolved into partisan attacks and physical violence and the inability of government at any level to function for the good of the whole.
I now see the nascent contemporary 60s movement coming out of what has been called heterodox thinkers. it is still relatively small but it is growing. and it is gathering members from both left and right who all have in common a belief in thinking, examining issues deeply, self-reflection, and liberal democracy. They are also slowly and continually confronting the extremes of both left and right, as well as their incredibly infantile belief systems and behavior. The exhausted middle is beginning to respond to this, most often with relief.
Ecological reclamation does not only apply to ecosystems.