Recently, Twitter erupted in response to rumors that Harper’s Magazine was planning to reveal the creator of a spreadsheet, passed around media circles, collecting anonymous claims of sexual harassment and abuse within the industry. The backlash was instant — an outpouring of support that might have played a part in motivating Moira Donegan, the spreadsheet’s creator, to reveal herself in a blistering essay on The Cut. “A lot of us are angry in this moment,” she wrote near the end of the piece, “not just at what happened to us but at the realization of the depth and frequency of these behaviors and the ways that so many of us have been drafted, wittingly and unwittingly, into complicity. But we’re being challenged to imagine how we would prefer things to be.” To break out of complicity and silence is to imagine something different — to reckon forcefully with the notion that there is such a thing as a right side and a wrong one.

In 2002, Roger Silverstone, the pioneering media scholar at the London School of Economics, published an essay called “Complicity and Collusion in the Mediation of Everyday Life,” in which he argued that our sense of reality is created by two groups of people: those who produce media and those who consume it. Audiences, he argued, are never quite as passive as they’re made out to be; they are active participants in the creation and perpetuation of a shared reality. If we take everyday life “as a moral and social space” in which “our common humanity is created and sustained,” then we must take responsibility not only for what we produce and put into the world but also for how we consume — passively and mindlessly, or actively and critically.

Both, Silverstone said, have moral consequences. When we allow lies, misrepresentations and deception to go unchallenged, we become complicit in trading reality for falsehood. By accepting a system in which the powerful can twist reality into some shape that’s convenient to them, and the images and media we see every day reflect that, then “they both fail us, and crucially, we them.”

Silverstone was writing in 2002, but he might as well have been foreseeing the current moment. He described a culture built on bad-faith representations of other people. He described our uncritical acceptance of those representations. And he argued, persuasively, that this acceptance has moral consequences. Knowing but pretending not to know; declining to fully grasp or care about what we’ve witnessed; playing dumb for the sake of getting along, of preserving the familiar status quo; these are the same strategies that allowed a culture of workplace abuse and harassment, notably in Hollywood but also everywhere else, to continue unchecked. The reason we hear “complicit” so often now is a matter of tolerance: The more abuse we see uncovered, the less patience we can summon for its enablers. The difficulty, as ever, is sorting out how much can be expected of any of us. Is Dorsey complicit? Is Streep? Does asking these questions even help? Complicity can be found in nearly every action or inaction, every utterance or failure to speak. What’s clear is that many seem more eager than ever to hunt it down — whether in ourselves or in others — and collapse whatever wrong it supported.