I don’t care for pile ons I find the mob mentality to be exceedingly nasty regardless if the movement is deemed acceptable behavior. Especially so when perpetrated by gynophobes.
I appreciate the thought you put into your post. I think you’re leaving out a possibility, however, which is:
- The right-wing outrage machine is ginning up another melodrama in order to create the outrage they need to maintain the culture war.
They’re not throwing red meat because their viewers care about it. That’s precisely backwards. Their viewers care about it because Fox et al keep throwing them red meat.
If this is something that The Common People should really care about then it’s something that’s happening in their hometown. A viewer in Fuquay Varina, North Carolina shouldn’t have to hear about a handjob-themed hot sauce controversy from Canada in order to get alarmed; they should hear about Mikey’s Taco Stand in Fuquay Varina getting canceled. The Bozeman Fox viewer shouldn’t be worried about Milo Yiannopoulos getting bullied in Berkeley; they should be upset about the reporter being assaulted in their own hometown.
But that’s not what’s happening. The right-wing spin machine needs a culture war in order to maintain viewership and to get people frightened so they’ll keep voting for Republicans. So they’re taking isolated incidents from literally around the world, distorting what’s happened, and blowing them up. As a result, many Common People have the misapprehension that “Cancel Culture” is a genuine threat to them, when they’re likelier to be struck by lightning than to be canceled.
The culture wars are really very little other than old school demagoguery. It appeals to the uninterested, can’t-be-bothered, don’t really understand ‘balance of trade,’ apathetic when elections come around, fearful folk.
It’s sort of the intellectual equivalent of the BRAT Diet.
‘Cancel culture’ has one element that I find a bit different than the usual RW demagoguery, and that is: it’s not bullshit made up from whole cloth.
They’ve taken a page from the LW playbook, IMHO, and used something in which a tiny kernel of truth actually does exist, and then blown it so wildly out of proportion that it (no longer bears any relationship to the infinitesimal element of original truth, and) is a fearsome and epithetical change, like every other change the RW promises is coming if you vote Democrat, but … y’know … miraculously never does arrive.
The RW demagogues want the microphone. They want the biggest platforms in our universe available to them. They want this, and they want to not be constrained by truth, logic, fact, reason, critical thinking, or decency.
And they want no blowback for their blowharditude*.
Seems like a big ask.
TL;DR: it’s the greedy and the ignorant, same as it ever was.
*Blowhardedness ?
*Blowhardosity ?
But it’s never been made up from whole cloth.
In the nineties, complaints about gay pride were based off images of gay men in assless chaps in public parades. Which were real images, and sure, I don’t necessarily want to see anyone’s bare ass as I walk down the street. But these images were treated as though they represented, not only these specific gay men at all times (instead of festival behavior in the middle of a pride parade and as defiance against a culture that was cheering their death through a pandemic), but also all gay men at all times. LOOK AT THE THREAT TO OUR CULTURE FROM TEH GAYS! they shouted.
In the 2000s, the War on Christmas was based off such things as a cross being removed from the top of a town’s official Christmas tree, or sporadic cases of teachers removing Santa Claus decorations because they thought, mistakenly, they were unconstitutional. Those things really happened. The resulting insanity, however–in which people thought somehow that they were banned from wishing one another Merry Christmas–was a cynical distortion and manipulation of the public.
In the 2010s, the bathroom bills were based on a few cases–again, pulled from all over the planet–in which sexual assaults were committed by people variously identifying as female (although assigned male at birth), or in gender-neutral spaces, or simply going into female spaces without permission. These incidents are incredibly rare, but the culture wars turn them into YOU SHOULD BE SCARED FOR YOUR CHILDREN narratives and use them both to persecute transgender folk and to get people to go to the polls.
And don’t even get me started on the “election fraud” bullshit.
The right-wing playbook is 100% to take something very rare and/or minor, distort and exaggerate its frequency and/or severity, and use these distortions to drive up hate and fear, and to get people to vote for conservatives who promise to vanquish the (mostly nonexistent) threat.
Point well made, and taken.
I was thinking about the “Stop the Steal” shit, and Pizzagate, and QAnon, and the “Obama-is-a-Kenyan-born-Muslim” shit, and the Hunter Biden shit, AFAICT, never had any kernels of (material, discernable, relevant) fact to them. They had shadows. They had smoke but no fire.
We’d have to be gratuitously charitable to acknowledge the kernels of truth that they claim were a legitimate basis for this kind of horseshit.
I think the RW feels advantaged when there is something underlying to which they can (endlessly) point, but it really is optional. They do just fine with demagoguery without even a scintilla of truth.
Oh, it’s simple enough:
Company decisions they agree with are sacrosanct and must be respected as the free market.
Company decisions they disagree with are the result of “cancel culture” and must be fought against.
It’s the conservative complainer way: “I want everything my way.”
And this is the core (or one core) of the disconnect by many posters in this thread, and people out there in the world: people make choices all the time. People give establishments bad press all the time, for all sorts of reasons. Somehow, if the reason falls into some nebulous Conservative idea of “wokeness” it’s dangerous and beyond the pale.
Yet not a single person who holds this position can articulate how or why a negative yelp review where I state that I find an establishment offensive is fundamentally different than a yelp review where I state that the staff is unfriendly. Or how a private entity choosing to not include content that they deem inappropriate in their own works is fundamentally different than a private entity making any other choice about the content of their works.
I assume this type of thing speaks for itself:
My only questions:
- Does anyone who’s not a wanna-be Hitler Youth wear their hair like that?
- Okay, dude’s an asshole, but everyone’s allowed to be an asshole in their early teens. If he’s still an asshole once he’s old enough to shave, maybe then I’ll care.
Excuse me for posting something actually relevant to the thread, but this news just appeared.
The company hadn’t intended to single out one book, he explained. Rather, it will be banning the entire category altogether.
“We reserve the right not to sell certain content,” Huseman wrote. “All retailers make decisions about what selection they choose to offer, as do we.
“As to your specific question about When Harry Became Sally , we have chosen not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.”
I kept reading that as When Harry Met Sally and getting so confused.
“I’ll have what she’s having.”
“You can’t, it was banned.”
You appear to be arguing that being pro-trans is somehow anti-women.
(I mean, you clearly aren’t talking about the very real phobia of women that can happen after a traumatic experience. If anything, people try to use androphobia to defend transphobia.)
That’s what every politician that’s tried to break with Donald Trump after he mustered an army to overthrow the government faced.
They whipped up their ugly facist mob and now they can’t get away from them. Now they are literally forced to go on TV and act like assholes every single day, complaining about children’s books that have gone out of print - because if they don’t, a violent mob of hateful vicious Trump supporters will burn down their houses and maybe kill their kids ( like the hate-drenched Trumper that murdered Judge Esther Salas’s son) and definitely accuse them of pedophilia. In the right wing alternative universe, if you break with Trump, you’ll be accused of raping and murdering children.
On the other side, it’s really about manners. And it’s really easy. If you don’t want people to call you a racist, don’t go to a party in blackface, even if your intent is only to shame a female newscaster. If a foreign word sounds similar to an English sexual innuendo, don’t turn it into a tastelessly named commercial product. If you are introduced to a Japanese guy named Mr. Fukimama, don’t giggle and say Mr. Fuckyourmama. If you don’t want your kid to point at an Asian man at McDonalds and loudly ask “Why isn’t that Chinaman eating with sticks?”, don’t read him that damn Dr. Seuss book. It’s out of print because it makes decent mothers cringe.
It comes down to “Don’t be an asshole”. It’s not political correctness, it’s just correctness.
Is there, on occasion, an out-sized reaction to the bad behavior of others? Of course. It’s called life. It’s called bad luck. Someone might drive home after a drinking a glass of wine without incident a hundred times. Then the 101st time, a child darts out in front of their car, and their life is totally and completely ruined, and not only are they in jail for the rest of their life, they go down in history as a child-murdering drunkard. It may be “unfair”, the accident may have been unavoidable even if they were sober. But life’s not fair. It’s bad luck, but it’s also why you don’t drink and drive. Like the punchline goes…”you fuck one sheep…”
Just because you avoid consequences most of the time you act like an asshole, until that one time…that doesn’t mean it’s OK to be an asshole. The term shouldn’t be political correctness, it should just be correctness. Or manners. Or civility.
For many, their point is: “I want to act like an asshole, but I don’t want any consequences for acting like an asshole. No faaaaairrrr!”
And if many people point out that they are an asshole, they think this is evidence of a “hive mind”, rather than evidence that they are actually an asshole.
That’s a good question, and unfortunately I think it’s one that’s impossible to answer precisely. Any definition of any widespread social phenomenon is going to have gaps and grey areas, but I’ll try my best. To make things a bit easier, I’d like to clarify one point before tackling it.
I don’t think cancellations are always bad. Sometimes, cancellation can easily be justified. I briefly made this point in one of my previous posts but I want to reiterate it just so there’s no misunderstanding. If someone is being overtly racist on social media, or goes viral for hurling racist abuse in McDonalds because their Happy Meal didn’t have a toy in it or something, then they should expect some blow back. And if their employer finds out and decides they’d rather not spend good money paying some racist asshole’s bills then…meh. Too bad, so sad. What else is on?
Cancellation only becomes problematic when the mob is roused to action by offenses which are far less clear-cut, or which may have happened a very long time ago, or for which the person being targeted has already tried to make amends. In other words, I don’t have a problem with cancellation per se. I have a problem with bad cancellations.
What’s a bad cancellation? More on that in a moment. First, I’d like to try to give a general definition of cancellation itself.
My gut feeling is that whether you’re satisfied with my definition will probably depend, in large part, on whether you feel the term cancellation should be defined narrowly or broadly. My inclination is to define cancellation broadly, because there’s more than one way that someone can be harmed by a mob. Also, I think the intention of the mob is very important. To me, there’s no difference, morally speaking, between successfully cancelling someone over something trivial, and unsuccessfully attempting to cancel someone over something trivial. It’s like the difference between murder and attempted murder. There’s a meaningful legal difference, and, obviously, there’s an extremely meaningful difference for the victim. But there’s no real moral difference between a murderer and an attempted murderer. The latter isn’t morally superior, just incompetent.
So, with that in mind, I’d define cancellation like this:
Cancellation is when an online mob coordinates with the intention of destroying a person’s social or professional standing in response to something which that person has said or done.
I’ve put coordinates in bold because I’m using it in a deliberately loose fashion. If someone has tweeted something you think is outrageous, and you want to complain on their employer’s Google reviews page or something, but then you find out that five hundred people have already had the same idea, and yet you go ahead and complain anyway, as far as I’m concerned you’re coordinating with the mob.
But how do we define ‘mob’? Is ten people a mob? A hundred? Again, there’s no set definition. The best I can do is offer what I think may be a useful guideline: The number of people required to form a mob is directly proportionate to the power of the person being targeted. If you’re someone with no fame, power, or influence, then being attacked by 200 people may feel intolerable. Conversely, if you’re an A-List celebrity, then being attacked by 20,000 people may feel like just another day at work.
So, that’s my best attempt at a broad definition of cancellation. Is it perfect? Almost certainly not. As I said earlier, I doubt it’s even possible to come up with a definition of cancellation that isn’t at least a little bit fuzzy round the edges, but it’s the best I can come up with for now.
Defining a bad cancellation is, I think, considerably easier. To me, it largely depends on one thing: charitability. My knowledge of cancellations is far from exhaustive, but to the best of my recollection the distinguishing feature of pretty much all bad cancellations is a complete and total lack of charity on the part of the mob.
A good example of this happened very recently. A 27 year old black woman was promoted to editor of Teen Vogue. However, ten years ago she posted a couple of problematic tweets about Asians. The tweets had actually surfaced in 2019 when she was (if I remember correctly) nominated for a journalism award. She apologized at the time and deleted the tweets. Unfortunately, the tweets resurfaced when she was appointed to her new editorship. She apologized again, profusely, but the mob wasn’t satisfied and so she was fired.
Now, the tweets in question definitely were racist. No argument about that. But the fact she’d previously deleted them and apologized made no difference to the mob. Nor did the fact that she’d originally posted them when she was still too young to vote. In fact, in terms of the consequences, she might as well not have apologized. If, instead of apologizing, she’d said “I don’t care. I still hate Asians”, it wouldn’t have actually changed anything for her. She still would’ve lost her job. This is what I mean by a lack of charity. The mob treated her as though she was still exactly the same person she was when she made the tweets, even though this was demonstrably not true.
Another good example is that of Nick Sandmann (a.k.a. The Covington Smirker). He found himself at the center of an international firestorm of abuse. Literally hundreds of thousands of people all over the world were cursing him out. Celebrities were urging people to dox him and beat him up. But what did he actually do wrong? Nothing really. He smirked at an old man. So what? If that’s the worst thing he ends up doing as a teenager then he’s basically a saint. The reaction was so wildly disproportionate because the optics of the situation were terrible, not because Sandmann himself actually did anything terrible. Now, granted, a young, smug looking white kid in a MAGA hat smirking at an elderly Native American at a pro-life rally isn’t a great look. But at no point did the mob stop to ask itself “Did this kid actually do something bad, or does it just look bad?”
Again, this is emblematic of the lack of charity and empathy at the heart of all bad cancellations.
A third example is that of the Asian food pop-up restaurant I mentioned earlier. Granted, I did get a couple of significant details wrong, which I regret, but despite that the incident is notable for the uncharitable way in which the instigator of the cancellation reacted to the restaurant’s perceived provocation. There’s no evidence that she tried to contact the restaurant privately before taking her grievance public. Instead, she went straight to Twitter to “call them out”. She also “called them out” on a podcast. This is very different to, say, leaving a bad Yelp review because one can be confident that one’s Twitter following is comprised largely of people who will agree with you and back you up. If one’s following is large enough, then pile-ons are an easily foreseeable consequence of taking one’s criticism of a person or establishment public. This is especially true if one’s complaint touches on matters of race, which is why one should, in my view, only resort to such action as a last resort, if at all.
Finally, I want to again acknowledge that cancel culture isn’t exclusive to the left. Even though he ultimately emerged unscathed (and, if I remember correctly, gained some very lucrative sponsorship deals as a consequence) I absolutely believe Colin Kaepernick was the victim of a bad cancellation. At no point did the mob even try to see things from his point of view. They immediately decided en masse to interpret his actions in the worst possible light (i.e. that he hates America) and then proceeded to act as though they’d isolated his only real motivation. Again, a total lack of charity and empathy.
So, to sum up all this rambling, if a mob gets you fired, (as in the Teen Vogue example), or tries to shut you down (as in the Asian food pop-up example), or just tries to beat on you until you crumble (as with Sandmann), that’s a cancellation in my book, and it doesn’t matter if the mob succeeds. What matters most is what the mob intended to accomplish. Whether a mob is a mob depends largely on the power and fame of the person being targeted. Whether the mob is actually wrong depends on what the target did, but if the mob is behaving with obvious uncharitability and/or operating in bad faith then the odds are that the cancellation in question is a bad one which should be opposed.
I can see your point, and I agree that when people like Tucker Carlson opine on cancel culture they’re often operating in bad faith. Unfortunately, no other term seems to exist and if I try to come up with one I’ll probably just end up causing confusion. I’d like to stick with using ‘cancel culture’ for the purposes of this thread, but you’re absolutely right that the term has been poisoned by disingenuous partisanship.
For me, there’s a big difference between leaving a negative Yelp review and complaining about a company on a platform like Twitter. The difference is that, on Yelp, your voice is just one among many. On Twitter, your voice is privileged among your followers.
Let’s say you have a following of, I dunno, five thousand people. And let’s say that you’re particularly outspoken on political matters (whether you’re left or right doesn’t really matter for this example). The odds are good that many of the people who follow you do so because they agree with your politics. Therefore, when you “call out” a person or a business over some political disagreement, you’re not just talking to the business, or to random people who might stumble across your Yelp review and not share your politics. You’re talking to a large audience of people who are already on your side, who are virtually guaranteed to see things your way, and who may very well have a good deal of respect for you and maybe even feel some sort of personal connection to you.
The criticism is, therefore, much more powerful because it falls on especially fertile ground. If you have an audience of that nature and of that size, and you use your platform to call out a person or business, then you are, at least in part, responsible for any pile-ons which may ensue, because such things are a very easily foreseeable consequence of your actions. This is why complaints on Twitter tend to go viral fairly often, while complaints on Yelp almost never do (as far as I know).
That said, your decision to bring your grievance to Twitter might well be completely justified. It depends on the specifics of what happened. My point is just that there’s a significant difference between complaining about a person or business on Yelp and complaining about them on Twitter.
Oh, she apologized? What else could she have possibly done? I mean, there’s absolutely nothing that someone with a journalism career poised to be the editor of a, somewhat, noted magazine could have possibly done to make it clear she had changed and was doing something, anything, to make it clear that the things she said in the past, now conveniently deleted, would never be repeated by anyone else.
Musta been one fuckin good apology…
That seems like a rather Schroedingerian interpretation of “coordination”: it’s based not on what people are doing, but whether people are aware of what other people are doing. If several hundred people all spontaneously complain about an offensive public remark, they’re not “coordinating” and therefore not participating in a “cancel” effort? But if one person happens to know about the other several hundred complaints and adds their own complaint anyway, then that person is the one doing the “cancelling”? I don’t think this definition is going to hold up well in practical use.
Again, that’s placing an awful lot of weight on subjective qualities of “charity and empathy”. I’m not sure that’s going to stand up well either as a working criterion.
For example, do you think it was a “bad cancellation” when two W. Virgina officials were forced out of their posts in the widespread condemnation of the infamous Facebook post where one of them called Michelle Obama “a Ape in heels”? Was that post something it was okay for “the mob” to be mad about?
ISTM that none of the people complaining about that post (which I think was pretty inexcusable, btw) were feeling noticeably “charitable” or “empathetic” towards the woman who wrote it. Does that mean that they were wrong to complain about her publicly? Should her “cancellation” have been “opposed”?
I think it’s very easy for us to be influenced by our own assumptions about who are “good people” who deserve “charity and empathy” and should be cut some slack for their mistakes, and to assume that people who disagree with us about that must be “operating in bad faith”.
That’s an interesting point, and you’re right that it’s one I hadn’t considered. However, I think it’d be a mistake to attribute FOX’s obsession with cancel culture to any one of the four reasons we’ve come up with together. Depending on the person, I think it’s more likely to be a combination of two or more of them.
I partially agree with this. You’re right that cancellation is rare, and the odds of any one person being cancelled are slim. That said, I don’t think it’s irrational for people to be worried, for three reasons.
Firstly, some cancellations can set potentially worrisome precedents. For example, I find the phenomenon of cancellations in academia particularly problematic because they can result in a narrowing of the range of acceptable opinions, which, in the long run, is harmful to academia’s truth-seeking mission.
I found this article in the Atlantic interesting. According to the author, cancellation is a very persistent fear among academics, and they routinely self-censor as a result. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a layperson to be concerned about academic censorship, even if (like myself) they’re not actually in academia and thus not at risk from this particular form of cancellation.
Another reason why I think it’s reasonable for people to be worried about cancellation is because, unlike lightning strikes, which are a fairly predictable constant year on year, cancel culture is becoming more and more common. Who knows how prevalent it’ll be in ten years? People might not be worried about what happens to them today, but they might be worried about what happens to them in the future if they can’t keep up with ever-shifting social norms.
A third reason why I don’t think it’s unreasonable to worry about cancel culture is because it seems clear now that being young and stupid is no defense. A man may not worry about being cancelled himself, but he may well worry that his children (and lots of children spend vast amounts of time online) might type something stupid today that’ll ruin them in ten years time. Given how dumb kids can be, and given their fondness for pushing boundaries, I don’t think this is an unreasonable concern.
All that said, I don’t think it’s reasonable to be obsessively worried about cancel culture. If someone’s fretting about cancel culture 24/7 then they should probably recalibrate their priorities. But some concern? I think you can justify that, especially given the potential severity of cancellation’s consequences.