By Don Hall

Unpopular opinion: 

If you decide to go into a public place after the stay-at-home orders have been lifted and refuse to wear a face mask out of some sort of Don’t Tread On Me bullshit, you’re an asshole.

Also:

If you decide to go into the same public place dutifully and responsibly wearing a face mask and decide to scold and video the guy refusing to wear one because ’Murika, you’re just as much an asshole as he is.

Yes. This means you, Staten Island grocery shoppers. It also means you, Las Vegas CostCo customer.

Both on the Right and the Left, the church-goers and the atheists, the white feminists and Black Twitter, we have gradually become an entire nation devoted to other people’s business. We have decided that YouTube and Twitter are the HR department of society and, if we can find some perceived wrongdoing and expose it to the Public Opinion Squad, we’ll get a cookie and a pat on the back (but only with consent beforehand).

The irony of the “Karen Calls the Manager” meme is that we are all Karen. 

Sure, the easy part is identifying the Karens who call the police on black kids selling water or on a black delivery driver she doesn’t recognize. A bit more biting is the realization that the jackass demanding better customer service and threatening to “Call Corporate” while filming the exchange on his phone is also Karen. The busybody citizen who stops to film the police pulling over a car or films a woman who failed to pick up her dog’s shit in a park are Karens as well.

Whether you want to accept it or not, the very act of pulling out your smartphone to film someone is a provocative act. It automatically signals an escalation. It is only different from Karen calling 911 and feigning fear in that her call is to a limited number of people; yours is broadcast to millions. No smartphone filming the incident, very likely leads to a completely different outcome.

From both popular culture and the high school hallways, we know there is no honor in being a snitch, but we also make exceptions for a nobler version we call whistleblowing. Whistleblowing is snitching on the very powerful and very corrupt. Unless that careless shitbird who refuses to wear his COVID mask is very powerful or very corrupt, your video of him being confronted makes you Karen. Petty, small, and erroneously invested with the power to attempt to control the behavior of others as if you have been appointed Community Watchman.

Minding your own business and taking care of your own behavior has become a thing if the past. Today, everyone is looking for someone else to break some sort of rule, make some cultural faux pas that can then be thrown up online to incite the public pileup.

Why have we all become Karen?

In the game theory example known as The Prisoner’s Dilemma: 

Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of communicating with the other. The prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge, but they have enough to convict both on a lesser charge. 

Simultaneously, the prosecutors offer each prisoner a bargain. Each prisoner is given the opportunity either to betray the other by testifying that the other committed the crime, or to cooperate with the other by remaining silent. The possible outcomes are:

If A and B each betray the other, each of them serves two years in prison

If A betrays B but B remains silent, A will be set free and B will serve three years in prison

If A remains silent but B betrays A, A will serve three years in prison and B will be set free

If A and B both remain silent, both of them will serve only one year in prison (on the lesser charge).

Self-interest and potential reward motivates most of us. Most of us, if put in the position of one of the prisoners in the example, would rat out the other out of nothing but the possibility of being set free. This, however, counts on the probability that the other prisoner will not turn on us, that the other has a more developed sense of honor than we do. That probability is low.

We have all become Karen because, at least in part, we get a surge of status when we put on our Scout Badge and decide to police someone else’s behavior. We want to film it on the off chance the person we are correcting will act out. The act of filming it instigates the moment, makes it aggressive, and increases the probability of bad reaction. Call it the Karen’s Dilemma.

Two members of society are out in the world minding their own business. One breaks a minor rule. The other decides to police the situation.

If A is corrected by B and ignores the correction and B walks away, there is no conflict.

If B pulls out a smartphone to record the ignoring of his demand (because as soon as the phone comes out, the request is now a demand) and A is provoked, there is conflict.

If a provoked A escalates to performative proportions, B gets good, solid evidence that A, despite the rather small infraction originally corrected, is a monster deserving of nothing less than destruction.

A calls the manager. B uploads the video. A gets fired because her employer (C) doesn’t want any Twitter backlash to effect his business. If C doesn’t fire A, the mob (D) uses that fact to indicate that C is also a monster thus putting his business at risk. B looks for someone else to film.

Sadly, nearly half of D is made up of bots created to sow the seeds of contention among us.

That bot half of D is succeeding, but only with our bizarre desire to all become Karen.

Who is Karen? Someone who feels powerless in the face of minor infractions of the social contract with a perception that by punishing those breaking the rules, she has somehow made things better for herself and others. It is that perception, that it is her duty to punish others for failing to leash their dogs, wear a face mask, smoke fifteen feet from the entrance, put their shopping carts away, park in the handicapped spot, failing to use the left turn signal, playing their music too loudly, or anything she deems a violation of her sense of justice.

We all are all Karen, armed with smartphones and entitlement, self-appointed Keepers of Civility and anointed members of a non-existent Neighborhood Watch. We are knighted in the quest for better customer service, keeping the parks free from dog shit, and the charge to constantly be on the watch for those random moments that give us a feeling of control over others and the possibility of internet fame.