To me I think it represents a lack of personal responsibility and willpower. Every thread you check, that person did something. They deserved it somehow. And they could choose not to do what people are heckling them for doing. You can stop being that person. You can just...move on with your life. If you've got a thread on you, you did something. It's not there for no reason. But without fail, they'll pretend it just popped up out of the aether. Some kind of weird anomaly that came from a primordial soup. As if the actions documented weren't THEIR actions, like they didn't do it.
They can't accept the fact that all KF did was document and laugh at it. If I photograph you doing something awful, I'm not the one in the wrong. I just took a picture of it.
Zero self-responsibility, zero ability to look inward. Just...soulless, irresponsible.
Yes with a bit of no. Mass digital society can't really know boundaries: discussion happens in real time without stop hours, feeding on content that's always coming in fresh. For Internet gossip, that means there's always another detail to grasp at. The key fact is that we aren't omniscient gods. If you don't feed into the meme, the meme runs dry. It's important to remember the reason people are featured here is because of their personified meme status, not because they are of any political, sexual, gender, age, ethnic or religious collocation. In fact, this website is as diverse as it can be precisely because anything goes for circus culture.
Do they "deserve" it? I don't think that's even the axis of the debate. Kiwi Farms is no more a judge than Twitter is. When I take the piss about a lolcow, I'm not thinking whether some rational mechanism of justice would allow or disallow their presence here. I only realize it is the way of mass digital society to organically create these situations. The discussion about whether Kiwi Farms is
right isn't the one I'm having. We should be
pragmatic and be concerned, first and foremost, that mass gossip culture
happens for structural reasons.
That is why the crime of lolcows is that they don't realize the
factual, not
ethical reasons why they're here. If, instead of thinking about whether it's fair or unfair, they thought about how it's possible or impossible, they'd live happier and less contaminated lives for sure. They'd dodge instead of argue. I won't pretend mass digital society is "fair", or that I approve of everything that happens here or there. I'm not suggesting we should ignore any ethical question about media or communication, either.