Earlier this year, Ethan Pringle took a whipper off the top of Empath, a new, hard sport climb in the Tahoe basin. He crashed through a massive tree branch and injured his leg, requiring a few weeks of convalescence before he could climb again. Though concerned that my friend was hurt, I also couldn’t help but notice the following irony:

If only the route developer of this hard, new sport climb in Tahoe had done the work of removing the surrounding shrubs and tree limbs to make sure climbers would be relatively safe when taking whips.

If only, indeed. Perhaps the collision of Ethan’s plummeting body with a six-inch tree branch could be called a bit of vindication for Joe Kinder, who, in 2013, removed a juniper at the base of his new, hard FA at a “secret crag” in the Tahoe basin in order to prevent precisely this kind of accident. Joe’s renegade gardening, however, resulted in one of climbing’s earliest cancelations—his reputation was smeared and he nearly lost his sponsorships.

To be charitable to Joe Kinder, he was just doing the dirty work that’s involved in establishing a first ascent, in which questionable tactics around route development must be navigated by a seasoned expert without the prying eyes of a naive public weighing in. To be charitable to the climbers who took offense at Joe’s act, the juniper was about 100 years old and it’s illegal to cut down trees without a permit. However, had Joe Kinder only acquired a $15 tree-cutting permit, his actions would have been legit. (Double irony: all of these trees have probably just burned to the ground in the latest fire.)

None of those details really matter, however, because this was never about a tree. It was about a kind of emerging online mob justice that is meant to piously punish people without due process. It was about a new kind of culture in which attention, praise, relevance, and status can be obtained by anyone who is willing to add kindling to the witch-burning pyre.

But this was 2013, when online mobs were inchoate, still too toothless to inflict much damage. This was also a time when redemption remained a possibility among the silent majority of people who are actually good, sane folks willing to forgive and move on.

As Joe Kinder would unfortunately learn, the temperature of the room would soon change.

Fast forward to 2018, when Joe Kinder was accused of online bullying on social media, and was promptly judged, sentenced, and excommunicated from the climbing community within a space of 48 hours.

With the benefit of time, I feel more confident in saying that I’m uncomfortable with how this episode shook out. Three years later, the social media pile-on still feels wrong. The speed with which his employers dropped him looks even worse. And most importantly, my own silence, my own reluctance to publicly speak up on behalf of a person who I consider to be a good friend and know to be a great person—a person who on balance has contributed positively to the climbing community— is the thing that still bugs me most.

Had I been braver, I could’ve had my friend’s back. I could’ve said what I know to be true, even if that would’ve amounted to nothing more than trying to catch a whipper with my bare hands. Owning up to this shortcoming, as a person and a friend, is me now trying to do better. I want to make it right, not because I think it will or even should change anything, but merely for my own sake, my own integrity.

So let me say what I should’ve said at the time. What Joe Kinder did was mean and inexcusable, but he isn’t a bully and he didn’t and doesn’t deserve the punishment he got.

Having weathered my own little internet dramas over the years, I know a few things about cancellations from my own “lived experience.” The first is that no one can actually prepare you for what it is like to be on the receiving end of one of these online dog piles. Nor can anyone who hasn’t been through one themselves ever truly understand just how psychologically damaging they are. The people who claim “caNCel cuLturE” is not real or dismiss it as a trope for right-wing trolls who merely want to be racist without consequences really don’t get it—and I mean that seriously.

The second thing no one can prepare you for is the fact your friends, colleagues, and allies won’t come to your rescue. You will feel abandoned by the people you thought were your homies, and you will be shocked by how few people in your circle have any courage. Is their silence understandable? Of course. You get it. Who wants to get involved in some stupid internet bullshit? But still … It feels like a profound betrayal. And all of the dozens if not hundreds of messages that you will receive from the good, quiet people, written in private to offer their silent support—I agree with you! and This is wrong! but I just can’t say anything and, Well, you understand!—somehow only makes it all worse.

I don’t want to re-litigate whether Joe’s post on his private Instagram account was as bad as some people seem to think it was—in part because much of the catastrophizing rhetoric that depicted Joe as some kind of misogynistic monster is self-evidently absurd. Yet as dumb as Joe’s post was, there is also no good defense of it. It was immature, stupid, and mean. It was a cheap, cruel, and unfunny joke to a private audience of around 50 people on social media.

I will say this: I was one of those 50 people, and when I saw the post, I actually didn’t even get it. The caption merely said, “Have fun in the Verdon, guys,” which was a reference I didn’t understand. No one was named. No one was tagged. Like any Instagram post, it was gone from my screen with a thumb flick, and I didn’t think about it again until it became a Thing.

I understand why it became a Thing, however. I thought Sasha Digiulian had every right to feel hurt, and told her so at the time. I still believe that. Her anger was justified. End of story. I also reminded her that she and Joe were once friends, and that he was even a fan of hers. He vouched for her biggest ascents in the Red when she was a kid, before she became the mega climbing superstar that she is. And to Sasha’s credit, she said she didn’t want him to lose his sponsors; she just wanted him to stop being cruel to her behind her back.

The way this clash played out in the public sphere was unfortunate, if not tragic. It didn’t have to go down the way it did. It got out of control because both Sasha Digiulian and Joe Kinder are public people, and their spat became the day’s entertainment in the Instagram Coliseum. The crowd wanted someone to die.

Social media is a really odd game in which we feel compelled to curate a romantic picture of our lives, which is perhaps a nice way of saying that we are incentivized to present a dishonest version of our own reality. It can be pretty and inspiring, but it can also be oddly self-dehumanizing. Some of the best advice I’ve ever received is to “mute” certain friends on social media. In person, you know them and love them, but their personas on Instagram can be … unbearable. It’s easy to forget that there’s a real person behind that account, a person that you even like a lot.

Since the tree incident, online mobs have become far more cynical, ruthless, and capable. People who otherwise spend all day posting about self-care routines and how balanced their lives are and how important it is to integrate moments of gratitude into their daily practices quickly reveal themselves to be the extremely competent witch-burning puritans that they are.

And burn witches they did. They went after Joe’s employers like a mob boss. “Nice business you have there. Be a shame if we boycotted it.” The response? Sponsors who had supported Joe Kinder over a 20-year career dropped him like a piece of choss off a route.

They went after Joe’s friends. They made outrageous claims that weren’t true and exaggerated the harm Joe had done, as if there was some kind of malign pattern of abuse. Media outlets left out details and nuance in their reports. Climbers like me, who agreed that Joe had been mean but didn’t need to lose his entire career over an Instagram post, kept our thoughts to ourselves. I was on a text chain with a dozen top pro climbers around the world who all felt that this had gotten out of control, and that Joe Kinder didn’t deserve this. But everyone also came to a sobering consensus: it would be unwise for anyone on this thread to say anything publicly on Joe’s behalf. So everyone just kept their mouths closed. No one liked it.

Again, all of this is over a stupid, albeit hurtful Instagram post on a private account that virtually no one even saw.

By now, the shrieking children on social media were in control. This was the beginning of a trend that continues to this day in online climbing culture. For a relative nobody, it must feel like a drug to discover that you have the ability to tell companies who they should and shouldn’t sponsor, and what they can and cannot say.

They were in charge of not just the companies, but also the athlete managers, the magazines, the editors, the writers, and even the random nobodies on the Internet. These people made it clear that they would be controlling how sponsor budgets are spent; what messages went out on Instagram; what kind of content editorial departments choose to run. They were in charge of policing the comments section across social media, keeping oppo files on the Bad people, and making sure that any problematic comments, any risqué jokes, even from accounts with no followers, would be screenshot and held up as “evidence” that climbing itself is an irredeemable sewer of bigotry, patriarchy, and hate.

To the degree that I am making a point beyond what I, personally, could have done differently, it would be uncharitable of me to not acknowledge the valence of progress and consciousness-raising that has occurred around some of these topics, which has certainly made climbing open to acknowledging problems and striving to be better. But we need not improve social norms through Pyrrhic victories that rely on destroying people’s lives and livelihoods, let alone hinge on convincing everyone to accept a series of unfalsifiable assertions, half-truths, or dogmas without questioning them critically lest they be cast out of our community as one of the irredeemable, toxic Bad people.

Is this the kind of culture you want for climbing? One where no one feels like they can speak honestly or ever make jokes? A culture where apologies don’t mean anything? A culture where we are incentivized to narc out people with Wrong Think, who don’t use the right words, all in the name of so-called “progress”—but actually because we feel as if this is our only ticket to status and relevance on social media? I don’t.

Letting the online mob run the show is no way to have a healthy culture, intelligent and critical discourse, and accepting community filled with diverse people and diverse ideas, some of which, yes, you will disagree with. Instead, I see a climbing world increasingly held captive to dishonest, bad-faith social media actors. I see editors letting unfalsifiable assertions and unfair critiques about the sport go unquestioned so long as they support trendy activist dogmas that can signal the right political message in headlines. I see companies releasing hostage statements to avert boycotts, and donating money to causes they didn’t know even existed the week before, just to make the comments section on their Instagram pages chill the fuck out. The only way to change this trend is if more people in positions of power are willing to think critically and act with integrity.

That begins with our own behavior—namely, how we talk to each other online. Whether we choose to build pyres, or log off and talk in person. And, yes, whether we are willing to stand up for our friends—even when they have fucked up. That’s all I’m trying to do here—to say what I should’ve said three years ago. I’m just one person. I’m not an influencer. I’m not significant. I don’t have a huge audience. And I’m technically “canceled,” too. But I’m slowly regaining the confidence to have a voice. I hope others find theirs.