Sometimes you have to hurt people

Against the tyranny of the edge case

All the awards we’d like to give Phoebe Bridgers for putting a stop to concerts watched entirely through iPhones. (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)

Phoebe Bridgers recently announced that her upcoming tour would feature “no phones” at all shows. Fans would be required to leave phones at home or lock them in Yondr pouches for the duration of the show.

While many fans expressed excitement and viewed the move positively, other fans went ballistic at the thought of not being able to use their phones. If we’re allowed to be honest, the root cause is obviously that Bridgers’ fanbase skews toward Gen Z, and many of them are utterly addicted to their phones. They find the thought of having to mainline reality without filtering it through the black mirror of their smartphone existentially terrifying.

But they couldn’t exactly say “I’m pathetically addicted to my phone,” so instead these angry fans made all kinds of other claims. The cost-of-living crisis entitles them to record concerts. Banning phones is classist. Comparisons were made to racial segregation. But the most interesting claim to me was that banning phones would hurt disabled people. One user claimed to experience “pseudo-seizures” and said that only looking at their phone could calm them down and stop the seizure.

One approach to this kind of ridiculous claim is to argue in detail about the merits of the claim. I could argue that “looking at my phone” is not a medically necessary intervention for pseudo-seizures. I could mention that pseudo-seizures are a murky concept, a psychogenic “diagnosis of exclusion“ that medical resources claim is difficult to distinguish from malingering,¹ and subject to abuse.

I could further point out that perhaps a gigantic arena concert is not the best place for someone who describes themselves as having seizures and passing out in response to overstimulation. I might even mention that if someone did need their phone, they could simply step into the venue’s concourse and use said phone there, away from the show.

But all of those arguments are in some way accepting a faulty premise. What I actually want to argue is that even if you take every single silly claim at face value, even if you allow that some small number of disabled people will be excluded or harmed by this decision, that’s OK. There are times when it’s fine to exclude or harm people. And we need to be better at saying that out loud.

The tyranny of the edge case

If there’s any possible way that an action could harm someone — no matter how unlikely the scenario is, how small the harm might be, or how easily it might be mitigated — there will exist people who demand that nobody take that action. God forbid the action intersect with any of the various -isms like racism, sexism, or ableism. You’ll probably get dragged to The Hague. This is what I call “the tyranny of the edge case.”

It would be bad enough if this absurdity were limited to social media discourses and online nonsense. But this worldview is now infecting society beyond the crumbling walls of Twitter and Reddit:

• Standardized testing might conceivably harm students of color, so we must abolish it.

• Common-sense criminal justice reforms might perpetuate racial disparities, so we can’t implement them.

• A solar plant might endanger the threecorner milkvetch, so it must be delayed.

• We can’t build housing because new buildings might cast shadows that would be mildly unpleasant, or because some people would be sad to lose a historic laundromat.

Recently, Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby was revealed to be an inveterate gambler, one who had even bet on games involving his own team. There’s not yet any evidence that he threw games, but he did bet on games as an insider who knew the state of his team’s readiness better than any outsider could have.

Naturally, the NCAA banned him, but Sorsby sued the athletic organization, arguing that he was a gambling addict and in recovery, and that he would be irreparably harmed by being banned from college football. This week, a Texas judge granted him an injunction that will allow him to play anyway, and the injunction’s reasoning is filled with edge-case nonsense. It argues that Sorsby would be deprived of “coaching, training resources, camaraderie, and regimen”² if removed from the team, that he would face “hardships” against his rights and interests if he can’t play, and that as long as he’s in treatment for his gambling addiction, he can’t be prevented from being a member of the team.

In other words, you can’t ban a gambler who undermined the integrity of the sport because he might be addicted to gambling!