mhoyeI believe that in authoritarian-leaning cultures “callout culture” has a perfomative shaming function, but in historically authority-averse cultures it’s an important form of soft self-policing. If you’re comfortable calling the cops, you might find it tasteless or pointless! But if your community - reasonably - does not feel any safety around cops or formal authority structures, it’s a necessary tool for community safety.
I also believe this was at the core of a lot of the fedi’s disputes about quote posts: “we don’t want quote posts because it leads to pile on behavior that’s better handled by blocklists or mods” v. “We have to have quote posts specifically because our community doesn’t and can’t trust outside mods to understand or even see what we see”.
It’s reasonable for a community to hear, “you can’t have the tools you need to self-manage safely” and to interpret that to mean “you’re not welcome here”.
Seeing “callout culture” discussed like it’s about having the courage to shame other people in public isn’t just a misunderstanding, it’s the kind of ugly ignorance that can only come from parting something out of someone else’s culture, stripping it of context and history and acting like whatever’s left belongs to you. The other term for cultural appropriation is culture, sure, I get it, but there’s such a thing as taking without context, without understanding and without giving back
Anyway, I think that when we’re building social systems there’s no such thing as separating policy, mechanism or culture. They’re all the same thing held up to a slightly different light at a slightly different angle. But I also think that if this whole free open fedi social whatever thing we want to build is going to genuinely free us, all of us, that’s going to mean building social accessibility and safety tools that we _might not understand at all_, out of trust in the people who need them.