Blog

10/4/25

The Quiet Swipe

I watched my daughter check her phone. She’s a young teen. Her fingers flicked fast, almost instinctively — a blur of motion I could barely follow. She read a text, opened a post, liked it, swiped twice more to see who else had liked it. Maybe she read a comment. Then she set the phone down and returned to what she’d been doing. The whole thing was seamless, like muscle memory — one unbroken movement.

I asked if that was how her brain worked now. She looked puzzled, but intrigued. She wanted me to explain. I couldn’t. How do you describe what it feels like to have a mind that once ran on analog — that once had pauses, that had to wait — to someone who’s never known a moment without a feedback loop?

Before constant input. Before the dopamine drip of scrolling. Before every thought had an immediate mirror. Does that change how a person thinks? How they imagine?

I can’t stop thinking about the thinkers we’ve been losing — the ones who could see systems, who asked questions no algorithm would let trend. Jane Goodall. Manchán Magan. Sandra Harding. bell hooks. Sonia Sanchez. Bernice Johnson Reagon. People who taught us to look under and behind things. To connect the micro to the macro. To think about thinking itself.

We are losing them at the same time that thinking — real, systemic, uncomfortable thinking — is being treated like sedition. Sesame Street was canceled. The culture that once taught children how to share now terrifies adults who can’t bear nuance.

And then there’s cancel culture. I don’t forgive easily. I don’t get angry often enough to need to, but when I do, it’s because someone’s done something so unethical it feels unforgivable. But cancel culture is a different animal. It’s a blunt instrument in a world that demands scalpel work.

If someone causes harm and stands by it, they don’t deserve our platform. Silencing that voice can be a form of justice — a boundary set for collective safety. But when we erase entire bodies of work because someone said something ignorant decades ago — when we discard the context, the time, the learning that followed — we risk something else. We risk cutting off our own lineage of thought.

If we throw out the baby, the bathwater, and the river the water came from, what remains to teach us not to drown again? Without the river feeding them, the oceans and lakes would cease to exist. Memory dries up the same way — not in an instant, but by neglect.

For me, it’s a matter of degree. Step over the line into deliberate harm, into willful ignorance — I’m out. I won’t amplify it. But if a person once said something that reflected their moment, and they’ve done the work to see beyond it, then I want to keep the conversation open. Because to cancel is to forget, and forgetting breeds repetition. And repetition — more often than not — is the repetition of our worst mistakes. The ones we swore we’d never make again.

Maybe that’s the real danger — that in the noise, in the constant stream, we’re losing our collective memory. Our patience for context. Our tolerance for imperfection.

The question isn’t how to erase harm, but how to remember intentionally. How to evolve without rewriting every uncomfortable truth into oblivion.

I look at my daughter and wonder: will she know what stillness feels like? Will she ever know how a thought sounds before it’s packaged? I hope so. I hope we all remember how to sit in the quiet long enough to hear the static — and tune through it.

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