On criticism

being necessary.

The internet has gone soft.

I say this as a Millennial who grew up in the cassette/ Discman/ laser disc/ dial-up/ ‘HANG UP THE FUCKING PHONE I AM ON THE INTERNET’/ taking-all-day-to-download-one-song/ fatphobic/ cyber-bullying-is-just-how-it’s-done era.

We bootlegged, we Vine-d, we leaked, we shamed.

We spoke to each other in a way that made Stephen Downes and John Lethlean look like newborn kittens.

We had Perez Hilton, indie sleaze, Tavi Gevinson and the Leave Britney Alone guy.

We built Reddit.

We were criticised. We were called lazy. We were called entitled. We checked our privilege. We did better.

We developed grit.

Nowadays, I see people post shit like, “There’s only two months left of 2024…” and I expect it to end with the sentiment that nothing matters, time is a construct, we’re all irrelevant and all going to die, but instead, it’s, “…decide how you’re going to set yourself up for 2025,” and I wonder if I am the problem.
I run to the comments to see if there are any other arseholes like me, but instead, I am met with a barrage of people feeling inspired to be better versions of themselves.

Vile.

Where the hell am I?

Look, I get it. Maybe we went a bit hard. We weren't as socially aware. We didn’t understand community. We didn’t know the potential the internet had. We fucked around. And those who fucked around too hard and became extremists caused a lot of damage. But, instead of everyone agreeing to a universal set of boundaries, we swung too hard the other way.

We’ve become the Cotton Wool Generation.

I watched David Chang microwave frozen fish, saw clips of him slopping snotty, uncooked eggwhites over packet crisps for his live cooking show, and heard people call him a genius.

I recoiled as Dan Barber congratulated himself on only feeding chickens peppers so their egg yolks were red, and I concluded that this man had probably never seen a period in his life. My eye twitched as the comments flooded in saying how cool instead of miscalculated the exercise was.

I found that zen garden in the back of my mind when people called me angry or mean for simply having an opinion, rather than congratulating people for ‘giving it a go.’ Goddamn it, I am Asian. ‘A’ stands for acceptable. Anything less than that deserves to be roasted.

This is how we ended up in a culture of participation awards and Rachael Raygun.

How about we all feel some fucking shame for once?

The reason why I think people have a difficult time reconciling professional (or even amateur) criticism is that it straddles the line between fact and opinion. Facts cannot be disputed as they come from objective truth. They can be verified and backed up by research. Facts are universally accepted. One plus one equals two.
Opinions come from a place of subjectivity, are projected from an individual’s experiences and come from interpretation. Opinions come from an emotional- therefore irrational- and relative place. One times one equals one, but it really feels like it should be two, no?

So, why don’t we critique only using facts?