The Comments Section Is Wild - Snark Is Free, Humanity Costs Extra (Apparently)
I’ve often cringed on social media when I see the cavalier and dehumanizing ways that we, as humans, speak to or about one another. Snark is the internet’s primary language, and while authenticity is praised and desired, in many spaces we’ve drifted so far from it that we’d rather consume a curated version of authenticity rather than genuine, raw human emotions. Caring too much is considered a crime; one that someone will snarkily accuse you of while claiming they are actually above caring, all the while continuing to give their time to you or the situation. Yeah, I spend a lot of time in the comments section.
As frustrating as it is to watch much of this unfold, what often breaks my heart is how we, in our quest for true authenticity and discernment, judge ourselves and each other based on beauty and financial status. I’ve seen several times someone tell another person that unless they look as good as or make more money than <insert celebrity or influencer here>, they aren’t qualified to comment on what they share online. Usually, these comments come from a clear parasocial desire to defend people they want to be friends with or know… or be. I even saw, when the internet believed Vanessa Bryant was dating someone, many people outraged, betting that this new man couldn’t score 40 points in a basketball game or that they don’t have as much money as the late Kobe Bryant, as if those are the things that matter to a widow exploring love again. As if those were valid measures of someone’s worth. As if, when you lose someone or something, the only right way to move on is to recreate that thing or person, instead of finding love, joy, and beauty in something or someone new.
Part of why this hits me so deeply is because I care a lot about people having the space to live the lives they actually want, not the lives that are prescribed for them by strangers, algorithms, or unspoken rules about what a “worthy” life is supposed to look like. I want us to have room for radical happiness, and you can’t get there if every choice you make about your body, your money, your grief, or your healing is being measured against someone else’s highlight reel or net worth. There’s something especially cruel about telling a person who is already vulnerable, whether they’re grieving, starting over, or just sharing an opinion, that they don’t even have the right to feel or express those feelings unless they meet a certain aesthetic or financial threshold.
For one of my classes in my ongoing doctoral program, I found myself researching the concept of agency and how it relates to motivation and action (this concept plays a huge part in the conception of my dissertation topic). Around the same time, I was delving into the concept of neoliberalism and how it has shaped our society in a chillingly insidious manner. Here is where I say that my obsession with neoliberalism (and its even more horrifying and looming little sibling, neoconservatism) and its ills cannot be understated. And while I can’t explain neoliberalism here with the breadth it is due, I will give this brief definition/context: at its core, it’s an ideology that treats the free market as the most natural and rational way to organize society, shifts responsibility from governments and institutions onto individuals, and quietly rearranges our values so that profit and productivity start to feel more “real” and “valuable” than people.
So, while doing my research, I came across an article that discussed agency in the terms of neoliberalism. In it, the author (Gershon, 2011; I’m a scholar at heart!) talks about how under this system, people are seen as “bundles of skills and assets” that we should always be trying to improve and enhance. In other words, we’re not just people anymore. We’re treated like little corporations walking around, constantly managing and optimizing ourselves. Every relationship, whether it’s between two people or between a person and a giant organization, starts to look like a transaction: a cost–benefit analysis where everyone is supposed to protect their own bottom line.
Gershon explains that in this worldview, all kinds of actors, whether individuals, communities, companies, even governments, are treated as if they’re the same type of thing, just different-sized bundles of skills and assets. That “flattening” means the relationship between me and a billion‑dollar platform, or me and a beloved celebrity, gets framed as if we’re on equal footing, each just making savvy choices in the marketplace of attention. Ever heard: “You have the same 24 hours as whatever celebrity?” It’s like… yes, but also no, not at all. My responsibility to huge institutions ends up being treated like it’s on the same level as my responsibility to another human being, while their responsibility to me quietly shrinks or disappears.
Under that kind of logic, agency becomes very narrow and very lonely. Instead of being about what we can do together, it becomes about how well I manage myself: my risks, my brand, my emotions, my output. If something goes wrong, if I’m struggling financially, burned out, grieving “too long,” or not “leveling up,” the assumption is that I failed to optimize, not that something about our shared systems or structures might be failing me. Institutions and organizations fade into the background, while individuals are held almost entirely responsible for their circumstances, no matter how uneven the playing field really is. And this keeps us focused on our individual selves, trying to “make it” within systems designed to prevent that, instead of collaborating to find true solutions to our problems.
When I think about the comments I see online through that lens, they make a different kind of terrible sense. If we’ve been taught to see ourselves and everyone else as brands or portfolios, then of course we start policing who is “qualified” to speak based on looks, followers, or income. Of course we start talking about Vanessa Bryant’s love life in terms of whether someone can match her late husband’s stats or salary, as if grief and love are performance categories and she’s running a replacement search instead of living a human life. That’s what happens when we internalize the idea that worth is something you can quantify and compare, and that your agency - your right to choose, to heal, to move, to speak - has to be justified to an audience that is constantly doing the math.
The more I study leadership, agency, and change, the more I realize that what bothers me in those comment sections isn’t just the snark; it’s the way we’ve absorbed this dehumanizing script and started using it on each other. We repeat it like it’s common sense: prove you’re pretty enough, rich enough, accomplished enough, “unbothered” enough to have a voice. We pretend that if we can all just manage ourselves better, feel less, care less, optimize more, we’ll finally be safe and successful. But underneath all of that, I still believe something different: our most powerful agency shows up when we remember that we belong to one another, that our value isn’t up for debate, and that caring “too much” about each other might actually be the most radical thing we can do.
Gershon, I. (2011). Neoliberal agency. Current Anthropology, 52(4), pp. 537-555. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/660866
