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Did you know that when a caterpillar turns into a butterfly or moth, its entire body basically turns cancerous, liquefies, and then reconstitutes with a whole new cellular structure?

Most of the organs that served it as a caterpillar no longer do so as a butterfly, and there’s no real way to modify those organs into structures that WILL serve it as a butterfly, so it simply tears them down and re-uses the proteins.

Implications are left as an exercise to the astute reader.

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My first objection is that comparing to cancer to social movements seems off. You have chosen communism and other movements that wanted to destroy fundamental structures. I suppose anarchists might be a good example. But first of course, most social movements don’t have that purpose. The Civil Rights movement didn’t want to destroy its host. It wanted to change certain laws (skeletal structure, perhaps) and fundamentally change people’s beliefs, which would seem more like a virus injecting new DNA into existing cells (individual people). I guess there’s a question here if you consider a cancer that grows so large that it kills its host (thereby killing itself) to be an example of success, or if success is benign tumors that the body can tolerate, which seems more like groups of people doing their own thing while society moves about them unchanged.

To me, what stood out in your story is signal amplification. I participate in online forums, so I know how those can blow up. Still, by your own description, you had arguments on Facebook that eventually died down. People get overwrought in comments, small issues are blown out of proportion, sometimes people get banned or flounce. But usually, there’s a flame war, and then everyone goes back to what they were doing.

I’m not a big Twitter user, but it appears to me to have much greater capacity for tempests in tea pots. The connection between your social life and your professional life is blurred; you have extremely limited message size; and the interconnections swell vastly in comparison to how many people see an online post. That’s what struck me about that woman who managed to get the #CancelColbert meme going over one weekend – and then it died abruptly when a longer form media (the next airing of athe Colbert Show) clarified the original misunderstanding. How surprising that a misunderstanding blew up when all comments were 140 characters max.

I guess I am thinking of other high profile “expulsions” from feminism, like Hugo Schwyzer, or other ones that didn’t occur, like Dworkin or Freidan. Both women were known to demand blind loyalty, and revoked trust of close friends without warning. But feminism carried on, despite interpersonal squabbles. In the case of Hugo Schwyzer, many feminists DID dislike him, and his rather spectacular behavior doomed him, not any excessive demands for loyalty. He deserved the boot and he got it.

So it would seem to me that the real culprit is social media that can rapidly generate a positive feedback loop of outrage. The medium, not the movement.

Thank you again for the article, and I will be looking at your archives, as you seem very interesting. For the record, as a feminist, I also can’t stand bad data getting passed along because the facts aren’t considered as important as the message. I think this is endemic to any movement, though. In fact, I’d say people who place a high premium on accuracy over appeal are going to have trouble forming into any organization of their own, as we tend to lack passion. So at best, we’re going to be some quietly self-regulating cells, hopefully in a symbiotic relationship with a larger movement built from people who care a lot more than we do.

Again, I thought your article was very interesting, and I apologize for being contrarion right out of the gate.

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