Fascism is socialism in decay. Socialists have historically a very, very bad track record at detecting fascism. Not that shitlib millenials would understand that, because they don't know much about anything. But it explains neatly why they're so bad at subliminal messaging and writing stories. Everything is fucking hamfisted, gay, retarded, incompetently done and stupid. These people are fundamentally incapable of assuming a perspective that's not their own. They can't conceive of belief systems, world views and opinions that are not their own. They don't have a theory of mind for that. Say what you want about boomers, but at least they knew how to do Trek in the 90s.
The fandom has always done this to some extent. What Tumblr (roughly 2012-2016) did was industrialize it and tie it to the specific kind of identity politics that treated reading as a moral act. If the text contains harm, tolerating the harm in service of artistic complexity is complicity. That’s a framework that makes close reading impossible, because close reading requires tolerating ambiguity long enough to understand it.
Therapy language colonized criticism, and it brought the authority without the training. A clinician using “harmful content” is making a claim about a specific patient, a specific exposure, a specific documented response. That claim is falsifiable. It’s grounded in a relationship with an actual person whose actual reactions can be observed. The lay version skips all of that and goes straight to the verdict. “This content is harmful” in a book review or a fandom post means: I have designated this text as a threat, and anyone who defends it is defending the threat.
The move is elegant because it forecloses the question before it can be asked. You don’t have to demonstrate that readers are actually harmed. You don’t have to identify which readers, or under what conditions, or compared to what baseline. Harm is asserted, not argued. And once harm is asserted, the burden inverts: now the person defending the text has to prove a negative, which is impossible, which means the text stays designated.
What you get is the social function of a clinical diagnosis (authority, finality, protection of vulnerable people) without any of the epistemic constraints that make clinical diagnoses meaningful. And because the framework is drawn from therapy culture, pushing back on it reads as pushing back on therapy, which reads as denying that trauma exists, which is a losing position in any community where therapy language is the default register. The framework is self-sealing. That’s not a bug.
“Death of the Author” got half-digested and inverted. Barthes’ actual argument was that the author’s intent doesn’t constrain interpretation: the text means what it means to the reader, and the author’s stated intention is not privileged. That’s a genuinely useful critical tool. What it became in practice was: there is no author, therefore the text speaks directly, therefore every voice in the text is the voice. Which is the exact opposite of what Barthes was arguing. He was liberating the reader to interpret; the corrupted version collapses the interpretive distance that makes interpretation possible.
