You Were Offended. Who Gave You Jurisdiction?

Reputational vigilantism through institutional triangulation

This has happened to me twice. Someone has encountered a joke or comment online, preserved it as evidence and sent it to an organisation connected with my work. The aim was not discussion. It was to make my life more difficult.

What is happening here is more specific than “cancel culture.” I would call it reputational vigilantism through institutional triangulation.

That is not ordinary disagreement. It is an attempt to convert personal offence into professional jeopardy.

Researchers use overlapping terms including digital vigilantism, online public shaming, moral grandstanding and unequal social sanctioning. Digital vigilantism is particularly apt because the complainant appoints themselves investigator, prosecutor and moral enforcement officer, despite having neither responsibility for the institution nor any direct relationship with it.

Why “fascism” feels right, but is not quite precise

It feels fascistic because it contains recognisably authoritarian features:

• intolerance of deviation;
• surveillance of speech;
• denunciation to authorities;
• punishment rather than persuasion;
• pressure on institutions to enforce ideological conformity;
• the treatment of private character as permanently subject to public regulation.

But classical fascism involves organised state power, nationalism, hierarchy and coercive political control. These people usually possess none of that. They are doing something smaller, more banal and — in some ways — more developmentally revealing: borrowing institutional power because they cannot generate sufficient interpersonal or intellectual power themselves.

They cannot defeat the statement, so they try to damage the speaker.

That is why I would call it micro-authoritarianism, punitive moralism, or reputational vigilantism, rather than fascism in the strict political sense.

The missing proportionality is the central issue

A joke might be:

• clumsy;
• tasteless;
• ambiguous;
• context-dependent;
• genuinely objectionable;
• or merely contrary to the observer’s politics.

But contacting someone’s employer or prospective host escalates the response into a different category. The actor is no longer saying:

“That comment was wrong.”

They are saying:

“A person who says this should suffer consequences in unrelated areas of life.”

That transition is enormous — and often wholly unexamined.

The moral failure is not necessarily that they were offended. It is that they have made no proportionality calculation between:

• the original conduct;
• the speaker’s intention;
• the actual harm caused;
• the appropriate forum for responding;
• the likely damage caused by their intervention;
• and whether they possess any legitimate standing to demand punishment.

Online shaming research identifies precisely this problem: sanctions can become disproportionate, uncontrolled and detached from ordinary safeguards such as context, correction, redemption and due process.

Where is their hypocrisy?

It is concealed by moral licensing.

Once they construct themselves as defending the vulnerable, opposing prejudice or enforcing decency, almost anything they do becomes morally permissible in their own frame. They do not experience themselves as harassing you. They experience themselves as protecting others from you.

That collapses several questions which ought to remain separate:

• Is my interpretation accurate?
• Is the supposed offence serious?
• Is this person actually dangerous?
• Is my response proportionate?
• Am I causing more harm than I am preventing?
• Would I regard this tactic as legitimate if used against somebody on my own side?
• Am I seeking correction, or enjoying punishment?

The last two questions are where the hypocrisy usually becomes visible.

Someone who condemns bullying may conduct a reputational campaign. Someone who claims to oppose abuse may deliberately frighten a person about their livelihood. Someone who advocates compassion may refuse context, dialogue, forgiveness or proportionality. Someone who insists that language causes harm may ignore the material harm caused by contacting employers and clients.

Their moral attention is fixed on the symbolic offence, while their own behaviour is placed outside the field of evaluation.

In CDT terms

This is a beautiful (and ugly) example of low-awareness construction.

They have an Intention, but experience it as objective morality rather than as their own constructed intention. Their awareness contains only:

• the offending screenshot;
• their interpretation;
• the identity category allegedly harmed;
• and the institution capable of punishing the offender.

What remains unavailable includes:

• humour;
• ambiguity;
• context;
• competing interpretations;
• proportionality;
• the speaker’s broader character;
• the consequences of intervention;
• their own appetite for power;
• tribal selectivity;
• and the possibility that they are the aggressor.

They are therefore not choosing among responses in the full IACR sense. They have collapsed Awareness → Choice into a culturally supplied procedure:

That is not moral complexity. It is procedural morality.

The irony is that the person believes they are displaying heightened ethical awareness while demonstrating very little awareness of their own construction. They are occupying the Observer position toward you, but not toward themselves.

Why can they not see that their reaction is worse?

Because they are comparing unlike things.

They assess your joke by its possible impact, regardless of your intention.

They assess their own reporting by their claimed intention, regardless of its impact.

So you receive the harshest moral standard:

“It does not matter what you intended; consider the harm.”

They grant themselves the most charitable standard:

“It does not matter what harm I caused; my intentions were good.”

That asymmetry is the engine of the entire phenomenon.

There is also often moral grandstanding involved: public or semi-public moral action can confer status, demonstrate tribal allegiance and establish the actor as more virtuous than the accused. Research has linked grandstanding motivations with greater interpersonal and ideological conflict, although that does not mean every complaint is insincere.

Is it abuse?

One unsolicited complaint is not automatically abuse. There are circumstances where reporting someone is entirely proper—credible threats, persistent harassment, discrimination in a professional role, safeguarding concerns or serious misconduct connected to the institution.

But repeated, malicious or disproportionate attempts to interfere with someone’s employment, livelihood or speaking engagements can certainly become harassing and abusive behaviour in the ordinary psychological sense. Particularly when the objective is not protection, correction or dialogue, but anxiety, humiliation, exclusion or economic damage.

The crucial distinction is:

And yes, “I don’t care” does not make it harmless. You should not have to be psychologically invulnerable in order for someone else’s behaviour to count as grotesque.

Outsourced aggression

This is not moral courage. It is outsourced aggression: the attempt to recruit an institution to injure someone whom the complainant lacks the awareness, courage or intellectual capacity to confront directly.