We are living under a regime of radical transparency and compulsory self-disclosure. Pressures are applied to us from all sides to make what was formerly hidden in the private realm available for public view. Previously tolerated screens and barriers to full disclosure seem to be coming down. However the new dispensation does not involve the suspension of systems or structures as such. New, rapidly evolving etiquettes have arisen to manage behaviour in these new, radically open spaces.
Pre-existing norms have been declared outmoded and no longer relevant. However these dissolutions are typically accompanied by a simultaneous process of norm solidification, whereby new codes of conduct emerge and bed themselves in as social “best practice”.
If the worldwide web was once conceived of as a kind of libertarian digital Wild West, it has since been domesticated by new forms of content moderation, new ways of signalling one’s “authenticity” online, and new rules for censoring speech. The digital realm offers users a series of codes, tags and templates for representing their identities and emotions online. Structured profiles and labelling technologies (such as the prepopulated drop-down menu) channel user desire for self-expression in predefined ways. We are invited to choose how we present our identities online, while we are simultaneously modelled according to already existing identity categories. Through these processes, we in effect redescribe ourselves as data.
Structured profiles and labelling technologies (such as the prepopulated drop-down menu) channel user desire for self-expression in predefined ways.
These new social norms and procedures can often seem more insidious and controlling than those of the physical world. They are enforced by intangible (but nonetheless deeply felt) forms of social pressure from online peer groups. Because they are networked, these group-level emotions and investments are fundamentally fluid in nature, subject to real-time updates. The metaphors of the timeline (with its promise that, by scrolling through it, a user will be brought “up to date”) and the software update combine here to create a new expectation of real-time, network-supported moral “currency”.
From their very beginnings, social media companies sought to radically redefine the concepts of connectedness, relationship, and personal privacy in ways that suited their commercial interests. Writing in 2010, Mark Zuckerberg described the fundamental principle underpinning Facebook as the idea that: “If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that’s more open and connected is a better world.” To encourage the wholesale corporate enclosure of personal information that the platform depended on, Facebook began to redescribe privacy more narrowly in terms of privacy settings. That personal information would continue to be harvested in industrial quantities remained a fait accompli. However users were given the illusion of control by the platform’s new privacy controls, which could be toggled to customise the scope of the information being shared. Policing one’s social boundaries became a matter of manipulating platform interfaces and “user preferences”.
“If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that’s more open and connected is a better world”. – Mark Zuckerberg, 2010
As Jean Baudrillard observed in his posthumously published Carnival and Cannibal, the social controls that once held sway in traditional societies throughout the West may be disappearing, “but they do so only the better to be internalized in the mental sphere”. These new norms, developed for negotiating disputes and asserting identity in the online world, have begun to seep more and more overtly into formerly offline social life, fundamentally reshaping it in their image. In fact, one way of understanding “wokeness” is to see it as being in part an attempt to extend online content moderation principles into universal frameworks for managing speech, moral behaviour, and self-understanding in the offline realm as well. When, in 2024, Trinity Laban jazz lecturer Martin Speake faced a student boycott after an email he wrote to management criticising their new BLM/Diversity action plan was posted on social media, he found himself being pointedly “ignored by students in their group huddles” on his way to the inevitably empty lecture room. “The hive mind was very clear to see”, he wrote earlier this month as he looked back on his experiences. Speake’s students “had bonded in their tribe” against him. What was this if not an attempt to bring the mute, block, and unfollow functions of social media into practical being in the physical world?
One way of understanding “wokeness” is to see it as being an attempt to extend online content moderation into universal frameworks for managing speech in the offline realm as well.
Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter create simulated realities where personal profiles seem to stand in as straightforward digital surrogates for personal identities. Networks of interlinked accounts, meanwhile, modelled the offline social connections among friends, workmates, and family, each relationship type flattened into the reductive categories of “friend,” “connection,” or “follower”. Professional groups readily acclimatized themselves to this logic. Encouraged by 2010s trends such as conference panel live-tweeting, academics and other professionals created online social networks such as academic Twitter, library Twitter, and publishing Twitter. These were (initially at least) loose networks where members could let their hair down by engaging in informal discussion. However, if these groups superficially resembled offline professional communities, the real-time behaviour of their members was nevertheless governed by the new ethos of affiliation policing and social surveillance associated with the digital realm.
The new mini-genre of the online “open letter” that has risen to institutional prominence in recent years illustrates these logics at work. Open letters typically circulate through online professional networks, feeding off the uncomfortable proximities and status conflicts inherent within those communities. The point of an open letter is to identify a piece of moral wrongdoing, to make it “somebody else’s problem” (either that of an individual or an institution), and to publicly compel that somebody else to apologize or make reparations to supposedly wounded parties.
The emotional manipulativeness of the contemporary open letter is central to its coercive power. As Jenny Lindsay observes in her account of the genre, the writers of open letters will typically profess themselves “dismayed” and “appalled” at the actions they call out. They will make hyperbolic and unverified claims about the “emotional suffering” caused by the people at the center of their complaints, and they will ask on that basis for the “solidarity” of concerned and empathetic outside parties. The open letter enables free-form anger and discontent to assume a more compelling form as the demand.
Writers and signatories can thereby represent their personal desires to see colleagues and professional rivals punished as objective moral needs. The public nature of these demands combines with the trademark emotionalism of the open letter to produce the genre’s characteristic aura of overwhelming moral seriousness. Assertions of hurt, disappointment, discomfort and anxiety, meanwhile, testify to the oddly infantile nature of many contemporary open letters. Their emotional appeal effectively dragoons institutions into the role of parents, asked to step in and solve a particularly pressing sibling dispute.
Open letter authos will make hyperbolic and unverified claims about the “emotional suffering” caused by the people at the centre of their complaints and ask for the “solidarity” of concerned and empathetic outside parties on that basis.
Once distributed across digital networks, open letters are accessible to anyone and endlessly replicable by shares, forwards and reposts. They accrue significance in the process, according to a certain digital logic, whereby metrics confer meaning. An open letter becomes significant (a “problem” for its addressee) by virtue of the attached signatures ticking over in real time.
The names and institutional affiliations of each signatory represent miniature pieces of censure, ostracism and disapproval, but the overall number of signatures expressed as a metric constitutes the main event. The relentlessly public and real-time nature of the open letter thereby humiliates the recipient and creates the sense of escalating crisis that demands the open letter’s formulaic and customary response—an abject apology and the promise to “do better”.
In Emmalea Russo’s 2024 novel Vivienne, members of the so-called Coalition for Artistic Harm Reduction (CAHR) post an open letter online when they discover that a museum plans to include work by the artist Vivienne Volker in its forthcoming “Forgotten Female Surrealists” exhibition. Satirizing the tropes and language choices of the contemporary open letter in forensic detail, Russo has the CAHR artlessly claiming the moral high ground by addressing their letter “To All Who Stand for What Is Just”. Reflexively placing themselves on the “right side of history”, they write that “we strongly believe that showing the (harmful) work of Volker would be a step in the wrong direction”. Finally, they clumsily attempt to demonstrate Volker’s intrinsic “harmfulness” by combining a naïve and simplistic reading of her art with “what we know of her biography” to derive a bizarrely uneven list of “triggers” that ostensibly disqualify her from exhibition: “Abortion, Amputation, Anxiety, Animal Abuse, Attempted Murder, Bestiality, Bones, Incest, Pedophilia, Sexual Abuse, Torture, Transmisia”, and the free-floating and non-specific “Violence.”
The dangers of moral contamination lie at the heart of the open letter. What is “problematic” about the letter’s addressee threatens to radiate outwards and make others in their social and professional networks guilty by association. In other cases, the open letter may focus on association specifically, addressing the perennial contemporary problem of platforming—who is permitted to speak, where, and in whose company. Platforming problems may arise when a formerly “unsullied” network is ostensibly “polluted” by the presence of a morally contaminating outsider.
What is “problematic” about the letter’s addressee threatens to radiate outwards and make others in their social and professional networks guilty by association.
The point of the open letter’s calculated emotivism is not simply to attract attention in the affectively saturated environment of the social media stream, nor is it just to browbeat potential signatories into action. It is to represent what Holly Lawford-Smith calls “compelled association”—being connected through reputation networks to people you’d rather not be connected to—as a form of harm, with victims as well as perpetrators.
In the process, the category of “harm” itself expands, as does the corresponding duty to practise care (or “CAHR”), making the rigorous policing of the company one keeps seem like a moral necessity. Harm inflation also enables perceived deviations from behavioural or speech norms that would not meet any legal criteria of offence to be redescribed as forms of harm, worthy of quasi-professional admonition and punishment. The radical expansion of harm may seem like a reparative move, but what it really does is to open up vast new social fields to back-and-forth litigation and moral management.
In Vivienne, the CAHR open letter is a culmination of sorts, appearing at the tail end of a stream of earlier social media posts questioning Volker’s suitability for inclusion in the exhibition, and repeating various rumours about her private life. The open letter (as Russo depicts it) thereby functions as a kind of organizing template. It crystallizes the emotional disquiet and questioning expressed on social media into a more official-seeming form. In mimicking the temporal and emotional logics of the social media stream in this way, Russo suggests that it is the sheer accumulation of hostile posts in real time as much as their specific content that places pressure on the “piled-on” party, in this case, the museum itself. The museum duly responds the very next day with its own statement, announcing that they are “redacting” Volker from the exhibition in response to the “serious allegations”, but insisting that this by no means counts as censorship: “At the NAT Museum, we seek to foster artistic freedom in an atmosphere of safety. Wherever possible, we seek to reduce art-induced distress”.
What emotivist arguments do, as the criminologist Thomas Raymen puts it, is to “close the gap between seems and is”. Their assertive force concretizes subjective emotional responses into objective-seeming moral facts, and ambiguous behaviour by individuals or institutions into explicit acts of wrongdoing. The language of social harm thereby gives form to digital structures of feeling that are still in a process of accretion. Foremost among these is the sense that compelled association online is damaging and problematic in ways that we so far lack an adequate vocabulary for properly articulating. We just feel it. Efforts to rid professional networks of “dirt” and moral “pollution” (and to newly classify as “dirt” behaviours or attitudes that were not previously seen as problematic) represent attempts to impose order on our current social confusions.
What emotivist arguments do, as the criminologist Thomas Raymen puts it, is to “close the gap between seems and is”.
Hurt, betrayal, anxiety, the need to maintain good standing with the in-crowd, a desire to see justice and accountability fulfilled—all of these evanescent commitments and emotions can find form and direction through the lightning rod of the open letter. Both authors and signatories gain a new form of collective authority, while simultaneously disavowing that authority in their focus on violation and victimhood. Being seen as the wounded or offended party, like being in love, means never having to say you’re sorry.
For the recipients of open letters, the world is suddenly redescribed in the stark binary terms of good and evil, leaving no room for moral manoeuvre. The open letter seeks to define a new social reality, governed by a particular set of norms, and compels us to obey those norms, no questions asked. No matter how high they set the emotional temperature, and how urgently they seem to compel our immediate response, we must find a way of saying no to the emotional dictatorship of open letters and to the relentlessly expanding and trust-corroding logics of guilt by association that they enable.
