Cancelled. The virtual foot in the virtual mouth, followed by the virtual outrage of the virtual masses. It seems to pander to say that ‘Man Burns Self’ is actually about so-called ‘cancel culture’ – It’s not. It’s about the idea of the public persona in the age of instant gratification. A lot of imagery was taken from Tibetan monks setting themselves alight in the name of a cause – Here, the cause is merely to be acknowledged.
There is undeniably a herd mentality online that can manifest in wildly unpredictable ways. Entire cultural-political movements that fundamentally make no sense, like several alt-right groups, form on the sheer basis of provoking other people. There’s a severe lack of questioning, and beyond that, even an active refusal to engage in rational trains of thought just for the sake of being contrarian.
Scarier still is the way major corporations go out of their way to endorse genuine social justice movements as a simple PR strategy – A Nike sponsored protest raises serious questions about the authenticity of the protest. All of this, to me, felt like a very new form of authoritarianism– Twitter, with its 140-character cap to further limit the likelihood of intelligent debate, had somehow become the format of choice for changing the world. Much like in ‘1984’, it felt like we had begun to adopt Newspeak, except a more daunting thought was that we did so voluntarily and without the domineering of Big Brother.
~BUCHANAN
