So if he had been caught embracing the HR lady at a Christmas party by his subordinates, and then got fired, that would have been cancel culture? 'Cause that’s really, really stupid.
Show me where I said that.
The issue isn’t the “kiss-cam”, either. The issue is the way assumptions were immediately made about what was going on, and spread like wildfire throughout the internet. Who is to blame? No one. That’s the problem with mob rule – no one is accountable. That’s the whole concept of “culture” and its enabling technology as the root cause of potential injustices.
Again with the assumption of guilt. If it had only been known to his company’s management instead of hanging over his head like a giant black cloud the size of the entire internet, there would at least have been an opportunity to evaluate the facts and contain the damage if he was innocent.
The only thing “stupid” here is persistently denying the immense unaccountable power of social media.
But that’s not why his career is at risk. It’s at risk because he was caught publicly (and acted as if he was ashamed and terrified), not because it “spread like wildfire”. If it had only spread to his company’s management, then his career would still be at risk.
Again, that is assuming all are innocent. Speaking of zero accountability, even the MAGA kid made sure to get money from a few media outlets for not reporting the issue properly in settlements out of court. Of course, for other media the courts decided that he had really no case.
In the end, thanks to his support to Trump and other conservative causes, we got a government that is cancelling indigenous and other minorities in the USA. That is real cancel culture, as I pointed out, what you complain about here, is really a big equivalency fallacy. And not all efforts at cancelling are unjustified. One thing to remember: more cancellations that are unjustified now, are coming from the party in power, that is clear.
I haven’t said anything about Trump in this thread and, as someone already pointed out, that’s irrelevant to this discussion. The stuff the Trump is doing is not “cancel culture” nor indeed any kind of “culture” at all, it’s just blatant lawless authoritarianism.
Right. The thread question and theme ISTM hinges on whether we’re to say that everything that involves social censure or rejection is “cancel culture”, or if there are cases where it’s “consequences” that may or may not have been foreseen but that arise organically, as it were (*). Because if everything is, then it’s meaningless. (And yeah, persecution is not “cancel culture”. Persecution is persecution. Where did that come from.)
( * which BTW does not mean that it’s just or right or fair or becoming )
Also, doesn’t “cancel culture” require a campaign of influence? Like “that guy said something terrible, you should fire him”? I don’t see anything like that happening with the CEO kisscam guy. Just a lot of pointing and laughing.
Read it again, and the OP. It was not just Trump what I talked about and it was what the MAGA kid was supporting then, and it is relevant, as per the OP.
This thread is a complaint about what the right wing is really doing, accusing the left in a gross exaggerated way of doing unjustifiable “cancelling”, in an attempt of justifying what they are now proudly doing it in the open, and specifically, the thread is to deal with censorship efforts coming from the government and how different those efforts are with public and private businesses.
I hear what you’re saying. However, I think it makes sense to bring it up in the context of understanding the scale of relative harm. If the argument is that cancel culture produces a chilling effect on some people’s freedom of speech, it would help for us all to understand how great that harm is, and how widespread, and I honestly don’t know how to do that without comparing it to things that we all agree create a chilling effect on free speech.
Yeah, but also, who cares? It was a funny video, people laughed at it. It also, independent of that, might represent a serious ethical breach that compromises his ability to do his job. None of the people laughing at the funny video particularly care about that, and none of the people who suspended him from his CEO position particularly care that people are laughing at a funny video of the guy. They’re really two separate concerns stemming from the same incident, but you can’t fairly blame anyone participating in the former for anyone participating in the latter.
This guy isn’t being cancelled by a mob. He’s being investigated by his employer because the traditional media published evidence that he’s having an affair with his underling. Any well-run company would be investigating an employee in this situation.
The fact that a lot of people are giggling about a rich CEO being caught in flagrente is completely unrelated to his company investigating him due to probable cause of misconduct.
I see I’ve been ninja’d while writing this.
Returning to actual cancel culture:
“A mob” has no agency. It is made up of many people, each of whom has agency. And in most of those mobs, i suspect there are more people who just want to express their outrage than who want anything in particular to come of it. So i don’t think we can determine someone is “cancelled” based on the intent of “the mob”. I think we need some other way to identify cancellation. And i claim it needs to have some element of result, because “intent” is always going to be murky, at best.
I see your point, and in retrospect this situation may not have been the best example of what I was trying to say. I’ll use my response to you here as a sort of jumping-off point to clarify my position on this issue in general.
I’m hypersensitive to the power of social media to do harm, to spread disinformation, and to destroy careers and lives with no justification and no accountability for false accusations. I’ve seen it happen more than once. The Chris Hardwick case is a better example; though he was investigated and reinstated, many lesser individuals have not. There’s an old expression with many variants that basically says “a lie can go halfway around the world before truth can get its pants on”. Social media amplifies this ability to do harm by a factor of about 10000x.
In one case, for example, of which I had personal knowledge, someone on Twitter tried to defend the person being victimized by false rumours that had gone viral. The comment basically said that based on what they knew of this person, they found it hard to believe that these rumours could really be true. This was followed by a tsunami of responses confidently asserting that they absolutely were true. Every one of those responses came from random individuals who could not possibly have been in a position to actually know the facts. There was clear intent to punish based on unquestioned acceptance of rumours, a modern virtual version of a mob-driven lynching.
It was precisely the kind of hysteria that Chloe Dykstra’s post on Medium created. As I’ve said several times, I don’t know either Dykstra or Hardwick and have no reason to take sides in this fight, and I even acknowledged that Dykstra was likely expressing genuine feelings and that Hardwick undoubtedly acted badly in some aspects of that relationship. But how badly? Badly enough to have all his contracts immediately canceled? According to social media, of course! The inevitable mantra is “oh, yes, all these accusations absolutely are true!” The lie has been promulgated literally around the world while truth is still getting its pants on.
In general, once social media, driven by cancel culture, gets hold of a nugget like this, it spreads like a wildfire that’s impossible to control, heedless of whether or not it might be false or exaggerated, and victimizing the target all while the accuser disclaims with wide-eyed innocence that there was ever any malicious intent.
So yes, maybe a lot of the social media hysteria over this guy allegedly having an affair was just people laughing at him and not being intentionally malicious, but what struck me as significant and ominous was how incredibly quickly it went viral. It’s the same force that powers the spread of false rumours and innuendo. It is, in fact, the same force that drives the rapid spread of disinformation in general. When that disinformation is political, it even threatens our democracy.
You have a very expansive definition of “putting oneself in the public eye” and “making strong statements”. If attending a pro-life rally on a school trip wearing a MAGA hat counts, then wearing a Clinton T-Shirt to the Women’s March also counts. In fact, it counts more. Kids typically don’t get much choice on where they go for school trips but everyone who attended the Women’s March did so completely of their own free will.
So, if a MAGA mob decided to try and ruin a woman’s life because there was a photo of her in a Clinton T-Shirt looking a bit smarmy at the Women’s March, would you suggest she was wholly or partly responsible? If not, why not? After all, she was “putting herself in the public eye”, and she was “making a strong statement”. That does “carry a risk of disproportionate pushback”, apparently. What’s the difference?
That’s not really true. Things like the Sandmann incident never really happened before the internet. It’s the internet’s ability to make things go viral that allowed incidents like this to happen. Do you have any examples of non-celebrities becoming targets of global vitriol on the strength of a single photo within 24 hours, prior to the internet and social media? I certainly can’t think of any.
To me, it’s quite absurd to argue that a child at a mainstream political event on a school trip should expect to be turned into a global hate figure just for wearing a MAGA hat and looking a bit smug in a photograph.
No, of course not. Because we’re talking about cancellation, which is a form of social ostracism. Cancellation is very distinct from murder and it’s not helpful to talk about the two in the same breath. It’s also not appropriate, frankly. Would you tell Mark and Melissa Hortman’s families that they were “cancelled”? No? So why are you saying it here?
Using the same standard you’re using for Sandmann… “It doesn’t matter. He suffered no real consequences. He’s still a millionaire. He’ll still be on TV. He’ll probably get a lot of publicity out of this. He put himself in the public eye and made a strong political statement. That’s always carried a risk of disproportionate pushback. What did he expect to happen? This was his own fault. He did it to himself. It doesn’t count.”
Everything you said of Sandmann is about a thousand times more true of Colbert. The way I see it, there are two explanations for why you think one matters and the other doesn’t:
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Simple partisanship: Sandmann was wearing a MAGA hat so screw him.
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Colbert suffered a meaningful consequence which Sandmann didn’t.
If it’s the former, I don’t think we have anything left to talk about. If it’s the latter, what was this meaningful consequence? Because I can’t see it.
Now, from my perspective, I can say that Sandmann and Colbert were both treated very poorly because, even though Colbert is rich and famous enough that he won’t suffer any meaningful consequences from being taken off the air (and may even profit), he was shut down for a very flimsy reason by people operating in bad-faith who intend to cause him long-term harm, and whether they’re ultimately successful is irrelevant. Just like Sandmann. From my perspective, they were both cancelled. From your perspective, since you seem to only focus on the consequences, I can’t understand why you think either of them were.
Jeffrey Lange, who was caught on camera throwing a snowball at a New York Giants game in 1995:
I never said or implied “screw him”, and I’ve written enough in this thread that you shouldn’t be confused about that fact. Please don’t put your false words in my mouth for convenience of argument. It’s rude and dishonest.
Now we’re getting closer. Colbert was quite literally canceled. His show was cancelled. He lost his job. He literally lost a large and lucrative platform. Nick Sandman gained a job and gained a large and lucrative platform. So the consequences are night-and-day different. (Of course, Colbert and Sandmann both get intense vitriol and death threats, which isn’t acceptable in either case, but unfortunately it’s an expected risk of political speech and behavior in the public eye).
The goal here, at least for me, is to get away from a point where conservatives are waving around a bloody shirt every time a bigot gets some viral criticism, and settle on a common understanding of what “cancelled” means, so that we can distinguish between expected reputational consequences for acting certain ways in public, vs. talking about phenomena that are different from that and potentially more concerning.
Rather than read the argumentative wall of text above about your definition of cancellation, I’m going to reply to this with your own words where you suggested I was being overly picky about defining cancellation.
It seems that you have no problem coming up with a very specific definition of “cancellation” when it serves your purpose to do so! And it’s very interesting that you don’t include right-wing extremist murder, which is after all the ultimate in political cancellation. There’s no more severe form of cancellation than death!
All I’m asking is that we come up with something more specific and consistent than “someone faces severe consequences for doing something in public.” And I propose that the person has to lose something, whether it’s a job (like Erik Wallenberg or Claudine Gay, who specifically lost jobs), or their lives (like Melissa and Mark Hortman).
Simply gaining a negative reputation, with criticism, for doing something obnoxious in public is not an adequate definition.
Not a photo, but a single clip: Steve Bartmann.
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Trevor Bauer up to this point.
I think it’s an interesting case because I don’t necessarily think MLB responded well or correctly to the situation. But I also feel that the primary reason why he didn’t get an MLB contract after the incident blew over is because of his attitude since the allegations against him surfaced.
Sandman did more than wear a maga hat at a right to life rally. He also led his school group in “school cheer” exercises, which included one that was mocking of indigenous culture. Sandman probably didn’t realize that, but the indigenous people who were holding a rally at the same time and place (bad planning, anyone?) certainly did.
But of course an ignorant 16 year old doesn’t deserve death threats for that.
And the initial reporting completely missed that the school group had been riled up by a group of Black Israelites who insulted them in a variety of ways before the viral incident began.
Really, the story strikes me mostly as an example of “Twitter is evil”. (It was still called Twitter then, and seems to have become more evil in it’s latest incarnation.)
From the Wikipedia article:
In the wake of the publication of the longer video, CNN Business reporter Donie O’Sullivan described the twitter video uploaded by “2020fight” as the one that “helped frame the news cycle” of the previous days, and characterized the video as a “deliberate attempt” to mislead and “manipulate the public conversation on Twitter”—a violation of Twitter rules.[75] According to Molly McKew, an information warfare researcher, the tweet had been boosted by a network of anonymous Twitter accounts to amplify the story.[75][44][46]
Who was behind those anonymous accounts? What was their motive? They bear a lot more blame than random people who expressed outrage.
Look at our own little example of cancel culture. @wolfpup read a story about a fracas between a man and a woman that started with her publishing some complaints about an anonymous man she had a relationship with. And he immediate jumped to nasty insults, assuming she was horrible.
He says, counterfactually that Hardwick’s career ended. (It was briefly interrupted.) He says that the woman has no “shred of credibility”.
In his earlier posts he said that since Hardwick wasn’t died after the investigation, she must have been lying.
He backed off a little after pushback. But he’s acting out the very “cancel culture” he derides.
But does he want the woman to get death threats or become unemployable? I doubt it. And i doubt that more than 1% of the people who expressed outrage over Sandman wanted him to get death threats or become unemployable, either. They just felt outrage and wanted to express it.
“The mob” isn’t actually out for blood in these cases. “The mob” just feels outrage. And sadly, they amplify a story that attracts a few extremists who do things like send death threats or even murder people.
Were those anonymous Twitter accounts out for blood? I doubt it. I doubt the people behind those accounts gave a shit about any of the human beings involved. They might have been Russian trolls, trying to sow disharmony. They were probably just in it for clicks, and thus cash in some form.
But there’s the problem.
Sadly, we are busy defunding real news sources that can investigate and write balanced news summaries (if you can afford it, i suggest you buy subscriptions to real newspapers, and give money to NPR.). And removing what little moderation there was from social media.
So, I’ll admit that I haven’t read all of this thread, as walls of text and justifications do make my eyes glaze over after a while these days.
But, I do see this as being simpler than some want it to be.
If you choose not to engage with someone because of their views, that’s a personal decision.
If you tell others of your decision, that could be a boycott, if they choose to join you.
If you pressure others to join your decision, that’s cancelling.
As an example, a gyro place near my shop put up a picture of Trump after the 2016 election. I was disappointed, because they did have good gyros, but I didn’t feel like giving him my business anymore. I did tell others about my decision, but what I didn’t do is demand that they join me in it, because, as I said, they did have good gyros.
The question is whether you are doing this because you actually think it will be an effective way to change society for the better, or if you are just doing it because it makes you feel good. You should feel satisfaction from seeing justice done, that’s natural, but if you are seeking satisfaction from justice, you are doing it wrong.