"'Twitter gamifies communication,' the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen has argued; it’s custom-built to do things like score apologies, to drag users into a rating system..."

"... that has nothing to do with morality. An unforgiving god rules Twitter, where the modern economy of apology runs something like this: If you express what I believe to be a toxic or ignorant opinion, you must apologize according to my rules for apology. If you do, I may forgive you. If you don’t, I will punish you, and damn you unto eternity.... ... Twitter’s pious mercilessness is generating nothing so much as a new and bitter remorselessness.... Twitter is blowing its top, some very angry people very loudly demanding apologies while other very angry people demand the denunciation of the people who are demanding apologies. Dangerously, but predictably, the split seems to have become partisan, as if to apologize were progressive, to forget conservative. The fracture widens and hardens—fanatic, schismatic, idiotic. But another way of thinking about what a culture of forced, performed remorse has wrought is not, or not only, that it has elevated wrath and loathing but that it has demeaned sorrow, grief, and consolation. No apology can cover that crime, nor mend that loss."

Writes Jill Lepore, in "The Case Against the Twitter Apology/Our twenty-first-century culture of performed remorse has become a sorry spectacle" (The New Yorker).

There's much more at the link, including a lot of detail on the history of apologies. 

The split has become partisan, Lepore writes, and "The fracture widens and hardens." This is that concept of "calcification" that we were just talking about yesterday.

Lepore assigns the demanding of apologies to the left, and calls it "fanatic, schismatic, idiotic," though I don't think she wanted to say it's only the people on the left who are fanatic, schismatic, idiotic. The implication I'm detecting is that she thinks the left are foolish and will be unsuccessful if they demand and give apologies when the people of the right are simply "forgetting." She says "forgetting," but she's "forgetting" the word "forgiving." Elsewhere she says:

In “Forgiveness: An Alternative Account,” Matthew Ichihashi Potts, a professor of Christian morals at Harvard Divinity School, offers what he calls “a modest theological defense of forgiveness.” His argument follows that of the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who, in “Anger and Forgiveness” (2016), argued that forgiveness isn’t salutary for either party if, in order to give it, you insist on an apology. Potts calls this “the economy of apology.” It’s not better than vengeance, since to demand an apology and to delight in the offender’s grovelling is vengeance by another name....

Forgiveness, for Potts, is not an exchange—forgiveness granted in return for the opportunity to witness a spectacle of abasement and self-loathing—but a promise not to retaliate. Demanding an apology in exchange for forgiveness can never constitute healing, or deliver justice; it is, instead, a pleasure taken by people who delight in witnessing the suffering of those in their power (if only briefly). There is no such thing as a failed apology, then, only an abuse of power, because all forgiveness, Potts writes, “begins and ends in failure”: it does not, and cannot, redeem or undo pain and loss; it can only demand the necessary attention to pain and loss, as a reckoning, as an act of grief. Forgiveness is, therefore, a species of mourning, a form of sorrow.