The sociologist and writer Zeynep Tufekci on the reaction that one of her conjectures about the covid vaccine rollout received:
The third category of reaction, the most interesting from a public sphere point of view, was a version of “how dare I write about this”—given, obviously, that I am not an immunologist or a vaccine expert.
– Maybe Freedom is Having No Followers to Lose
She surmises about how the innate need for in-group and out-group identification is magnified first by social media and then further in uncertain times like this pandemic. But to me the most interesting part is at the end, which is also what the title of her post, is about when, on applying for an academic job, she heard back only either from the very top institutions or the bottom. Of the latter, she says
… the episode also gave me an appreciation for the ones with nothing to lose… They were in many ways the outsiders, but they didn’t have as many chips on their shoulders because they weren’t playing the game in the first place. They weren’t weighed down with the status-climbing because they didn’t have a chance. They were free. In many ways, the open nature of status-climbing efforts on social media has taken away some of that freedom and reconfigured it, and how to recognize its distorting effects is worth thinking about.