The Guillotine Needs a New Blade

Friends, my fellow countrymen, chronically online goblins: lend me your pitchforks for five minutes. I promise to return them duller than you left them.

Last week, the Internet devoured a 34-year-old substitute teacher because, in 2011, she tweeted: “I’m gonna kill my roommate if he leaves another Red Bull can on the coffee table.” Fourteen years later, someone named JusticeServedColdWithFries unearthed it, added the required crying-laughing emojis, and by lunchtime, the woman was unemployed and explaining to her mother what a “ratio” is.

We have built the most perfectly calibrated shame engine in human history. It runs on dopamine, self-righteousness, and the creeping terror that tomorrow it might be you.

It’s faster than the AP, crueler than the Spanish Inquisition, and significantly less forgiving than the Old Testament God, who at least allowed a cooling-off period of forty days and forty nights.

And the list of crimes now punishable by public execution grows ever more impressive. In 2019, something as innocent as owning the wrong chicken sandwich could get you metaphorically beheaded.

Liking a tweet that aged like milk left on hot asphalt is grounds for social obliteration. Using the word “crazy” at any point before Taylor Swift updated the lexicon is apparently a capital offense.

And being born before the invention of nuance? Don’t even bother pleading your case.

Meanwhile, actual billionaire ghouls who buy elections and poison rivers continue to post through it all, safely insulated by the simple wisdom of never having said “retarded” in 2008. Congratulations, humanity: we have optimized morality so efficiently that the only people who suffer are those foolish enough to have once been nineteen.

Now, a confession. I am cancelable on every axis.

I have said every slur you’re thinking of in the lawless hellscape of the Internet. I have laughed at jokes that would now require a 40-tweet passive-voice apology. By current standards, I am already dead.

Come and get me. I’ll wait.

Still here? Excellent.

Because the joke’s on all of us, because the machine doesn’t want justice; it wants content. It needs bodies to keep the outrage economy humming, and when it runs out of obvious villains, it turns inward.

Today, it’s the substitute teacher. Tomorrow, it’s the Queer activist who used the wrong acronym in 2016. After that, it’s you, for that one time you said “I’m so OCD” while arranging your spices.

We are all one unearthed screenshot away from the digital gulag. The only people safe are those who have never been wrong, never been young, never been alive, in other words, nobody.

So here’s a modest proposal: let’s raise the bar.

Before we ruin someone’s life, let the offense be worse than “was a slightly different flavor of idiot than we currently allow.” Let’s demand evidence of actual harm, preferably in 4K, with timestamps.

Until then, consider touching some grass. Hug your mom. Remember that the person you’re drag-quoting into oblivion also has a mom who still thinks they’re a good kid.

Or don’t. Keep feeding the machine. Just know that one day it’ll want a snack, and the only thing left on the menu will be you.

I’ll be over here, deleting nothing. My skeleton closet is a Spirit Halloween superstore, and every door is wide open.

Bring your torches. I’ve got marshmallows, chocolate, and graham crackers.

Now share this before someone digs up my old MySpace comments.