Cancelling a Greedy Lion
I know 40’s-45’s my “teammate years” (IR UGM 2007) is really greedy, like a prancing lion. To hunt me, whatever. My close friend, who had (45 hours ago losing her lovely Dad (suddenly) said “aku tau betul kamu amat baik nolong siapapun, tapi kamu gabisa memuaskan semua pihak, prada. Semengalah apapun kamu pada orang-orang jahat dan kamu berusaha baik”.
People-pleasing isn't inherently a bad thing. In fact, it's healthy to want to please your family or your supervisors. But there are times when your desire to please others can become problematic. Saying yes to everyone's requests means you're saying no to something else. Whether your willingness to volunteer for a committee takes time away from your family, or your inability to say no. Abundantly, I try to fight a lot “IR UGM 2007” not because I am losing my temper. Not because “its enough”. But really about “someone must fix my colleagues, fixing a greedy colleagues”
Recording the misdeeds of others is an offspring of doxxing. Online vigilantism, or doxxing, evolved from hacker culture’s propensity for dumping identifying documents, aka, docs. You see where that’s going. Anyway, because hackers prize anonymity, the revelation of a person’s identity was considered the worst punishment imaginable.
Since those early days of doxxing, the objective has morphed. Revealing a person’s identity has become a mechanism for outing political extremists. The tactic has, in its time, gotten it wrong. In 2013, for instance sample, when Reddit sleuths incorrectly identified two men in connection to the Boston Marathon bombing.
Many of us have participated. Remember Cecil, the lion felled by a dentist in 2015? I was but one of the chorus who posted a rant of outrage to Facebook, joining Mia Farrow, who’d Tweeted the murderer’s home address.
For most of human history, bad behavior was a thing to regret in and of itself. Given where the doxxing trend is going, creating larger-than-life characters who — depending on your spot on the political spectrum — may be villains or (terrifyingly) heroes, I fear for the future and what might become of this woman. There’s no amount of crocodile tear apology that can’t be walked back. But I do know that we’ve reached peak fatuity when documenting bad behavior is considered the problem.
“If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” Same goes with recording their antics.
