Gutted, went to reply and the phone died in the middle of my novel so forgive me whole I consolidate tequila ramblings. Basically it’s about the ratio that I see here; and this example is a kind of nicely packaged case study of larger trends. While this is progress and it’s good but it also points towards other larger worse problems. The event itself is just noise. To begin with, the subject matter itself trends towards more well to do white collar people, as its obscure enough that you’d have to have the time and money to know about it back in the day to have any sort of nostalgia. That’s the audience, older dissatisfied ususlly white men. The handful of initial articles that came before were sporadic and did not really cause waves to cause others to also write about it. It was only a cultural event when people were told they cannot continue to objectify this person and that is when the story trended. They did not care when people were writing that she had a problem with it. It shouldn’t even matter why she said no, a no should have been enough. I don’t work in this field, so why do I even need to hear about this. It is normal behaviour to respect privacy and people’s wishes. Why is that what we talk about and not Lena herself as a person? Her objection has been commodified and her voice isn’t the topic even after it was banned. Why does media only care when they can rustle some feathers? I mean the answer is obvious, and it’s not necessarily always intentional, it’s just a systemic problem of click farming and agitation in a bad way. Its addicting, keeps peoples attention. People are wonderfully complex, beautiful thoughtful creatures. That’s our problem, we do care and we desperately want stability, it also makes us vulnerable. Pick something mildly controversial and safe and you can get those passive clicks. It’s like pushing needles into those exposed to it, when this event is just a drop in the bucket that distracts from the people who own these institutions who demand this kind of engagement from these employees who probably didn’t even write the article title. It’s cheap labour, not investigative, and just serves to collect more capital. It’s a bad, lazy feedback loop that benefits only the capital owners. Legitimate grievences that need support get drowned by these things and I’m sure that there is more to this person than a playboy image. It’s absurd it’s even a thing at all. It’s hard to make a living biting the hand that feeds even though we all know this is all pretty bullshit. We’d do far better listening to people when they speak, rather than just reacting to them saying no. It’s the reaction that is curious, not the event itself, and reactionary behaviour is almost built into media at this point through finance.

Edit, oh yes, here’s a cool site that you can see comments across various platforms about an article. Useful for vibe checks. https://kulli.sh/