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Yard signs displaying your virtue don’t make you a better person, but they make you oftentimes feel like a better person, and I suppose that is important. Admittedly there’s only so much you can control in your life, and your emotions is periodically one of them, so the concept of showcasing virtue becomes potentially more important than actually being a good person who believes in, say, equality. It’s become so easy to do the corresponding digital yard sign — slapping various flags and sentiments over a profile picture on some platform — that tons of people do it.
There’s no specific problem with the electronic yard sign. In all honesty, no one should take anything on social media that seriously, because it’s just a giant game of comparison that means very little, and usually you’re comparing your everyday to someone’s highlight reel, and that’s not a good recipe. But there is a broader problem with “cause of the moment” alignment — it essentially prevents real change from happening long-term, because people are just pivoting to the next story, the next outrage, the next cause, the next hashtag, the next flag, etc. It’s very hard to build something long-term and sustainable change-wise in that way. You could argue that LBGTQ equality came about from digital revolutions, and perhaps you’d be right at some level. But is equality really there? Most of the right-leaning agenda these…
