That is awfully kind of you to say, but I still feel my style of arguing is not all that persuasive.
Let’s be honest, it’s hard to persuade people one way or another. And sometimes, we aren’t the right messenger for the job, no matter how right you are or how clearly you see things.
Sometimes, you just need to send a letter to that person’s mother, letting her know her child is being racist.
This calls to mind a meme from my youth:
In the same vein, what are the views for which people have been cancelled? Was Rosanne Barr cancelled for arguing for a smaller Federal deficit? Was James Bennett cancelled for publishing an Op-Ed arguing for charter schools? Don’t answer, that’s rhetorical. My point is that the furor over cancel culture is just another way for Republicans to try and play the victim. E.g. you call for violence, or you say that some group is sub-human, and then you get upset when those people and their friends don’t want to do business with you, and doesn’t that make you the real victim in the end? Like the War on Christmas, it’s repubs desperately flailing around for some way in which they’re not the baddies.
I may have missed it, but isn’t ‘cancel culture’ exactly what right wing loons did to Kaepernick?
You’re thinking of “billionaires colluding in a closed market to protect their branding deals.” Easy mistake to make.
Cancel Culture is broadening the range and severity of public transgressions into fireable offenses. Effectively instead of apologizing the transgression is supposed to “end” their career.
Perhaps annoyingly who is vulnerable to cancel culture and the range of transgressions cancel-able is not at all all-inclusive. For ex., a person is far more likely to be “cancelled” if they said something racist than if they had been arrested for murder. In fact in some ways this phenomenon entirely exists as a way of enforcing penalties for entirely “legal” but culturally insensitive infractions. Cancel culture only works if the person is dependent upon larger entities that have risk aversion and fear public reprisals.
So a museum curator or a media figure is highly suspectible to being “cancelled”. Someone dependent on YouTube income can be “cancelled”. Elon Musk otoh can’t be “cancelled” because he’s entirely self funded. It doesn’t matter if Twitter likes or hates him, and therefore it doesn’t matter if he says something terrible or not - you can’t cancel a guy who doesn’t depend upon the public’s approval.
So that’s what’s basically annoying about “cancel culture”, that it amplifies a single transgression into a cancellable offense but is actually rather limited as to the scope of offenses and how effective a pile on is. It does feel more than a little like bullying then, because the people targeted tend to not have the resources or capital to fend off the mob.
SEATTLE — Boeing Co’s communications chief Niel Golightly abruptly resigned on Thursday, following an employee’s complaint over an article the former U.S. military pilot wrote 33 years ago arguing women should not serve in combat.
…
“My article was a 29-year-old Cold War navy pilot’s misguided contribution to a debate that was live at the time,” Golightly said in a statement included in Boeing’s announcement.
“My argument was embarrassingly wrong and offensive. The article is not a reflection of who I am; but nonetheless I have decided that in the interest of the company I will step down,” Golightly said.
Emphasis mine. This may not be literally what you were asking when you said you wanted an example of someone being “silenced”, but it’s absolutely an example of @instant0’s definition:
[Cancel] Culture is digging 40 years back in someones history to find a picture they have from their high school where they are doing something that in todays climate is considered anathema and using it to either put them on the defensive, silence them or get them to lose their income.
James Gunn for his old tweets as well, although Disney/Marvel eventually re-hired him.
Everything I read suggests that no one really believes that this is why Golightly resigned.
Not really cancelled, then.
I don’t doubt that you can actually find someone who has paid a professional or social price for saying bad things a long time ago. What I do doubt is that you’ll find very many, or that the ‘injustice’ they suffer for the views is particularly worthy of pity; or that this description actually fits most of the people who complain they’ve been harmed by ‘cancel culture’.
Sure. But people did try to get him fired permanently.
I had only read The NY Times article I shared, and since your response only done the most cursory searching in follow up but I didn’t see any reporting contesting this. Can you share some of what you’ve read?
It was really only coincidence that I saw The NY Times article mentioned earlier today so it came to mind immediately when I was catching up on this thread later. I could certainly be out of the loop on other issues with Boeing or Golightly.
I’m mostly talking about journalist reactions to the story on twitter. Not any actual reporting, just disbelief that there isn’t something more to it.
I liked your whole post but wanted to highlight this because I was trying to figure out a way to discuss this aspect of it earlier. I’m still not sure I’ve succeeded in furthering the discussion, reviewing this before I hit “Reply” and I feel like I’m rambling a bit, but oh well.
There are clearly bad actors who play the victim card and blame cancel culture because they’re being “silenced”—and they do this from huge platforms making it clear they’re anything but silenced. In those instances it’s just a rephrased version of the old cry of “censorship!” when someone gets dropped from a platform.
I completely understand why someone would look at those people and be skeptical that cancel culture is some new or even real thing.
But I the part of your post I quoted and highlighted makes it hard to see how someone could write off the possibility that at least some of what’s being discussed is a real, new, phenomena.
Cancel culture—if you grant there’s a possibility that it’s real—doesn’t exist without this dynamic of these risk averse companies, platforms, organizations, whatever. Something seems to have changed about the way they gauge and respond to the risk of public reprisals in a way that’s different from the old model. I think social media is a part of it, and maybe a large part of why this is a new effect.
So to look at it from that perspective, it does seem inevitable that with the power we’ve granted social media, there are going to be manifestations of that power that can be wielded in new ways, by new groups, with new results.
Okay yes, I’m definitely rambling now.
Is there an existing thread we should move this “cancel culture” discussion to? Or should we make a new one and have a mod move these posts? Asking after I’ve furthered the tangent myself here, obviously. But I think it’s an interesting thing to follow, and this almost certainly isn’t the right thread for an ongoing discussion.
I really don’t think it is. I imagine that a white person in Alabama in the 50s espousing equality and arguing against segregation and socializing with African-Americans probably found themselves pretty damned canceled by the larger society, socially and economically and practically. What’s different now is that it happens to the people who used to have that power, and they don’t like that.
I agree that you were rambling, but also agree that you made a good point. The way I see it is that the internet in general and social media in specific have finally delivered on the promise to bring us all closer together and shrink the world. So congratulations to social media are in order. They have taken problems that used to exist only in small-town settings, where everyone knew everyone and gossip was the main form of news, and recreated them at national or even international scale.
Matt_W
3496
Wut? I’m fairly certain this isn’t the case at all. I mean I could definitely be fired for telling a racist joke at work (which has been true for my entire working life), but I would also definitely be fired if I got arrested for murder.
Only the narrow context of Twitter/social media outrage. Actual linkable offenses, “X said Y” (and there’s the evidence of Y linked for everyone to get angry about) is more viral than “somebody has been charged and arrested for Z” and link to some news article that 90%+ of Twitter users won’t even click on, much less read past the headline.
I mean, maybe i’m wrong? and i’m willing to be wrong, but from the narrow experiences I’ve seen actual crimes tend to be less viral than social media crimes. OTOH, Twitter outrage burns itself out after a couple of weeks.
Matt_W
3498
I’m not sure it’s surprising that social media crimes are highlighted on social media. In the real world of courtrooms and HR offices, where freedom and incomes are at stake rather than some echo-chamber idea of reputation, real crimes matter much more.
Well of course… but Cancel Culture doesn’t describe the phenomenon of filing things of record at your County Clerk’s office or filling out paperwork to file with a government agency. It’s specifically about what gains the ire of Social Media, and the extents and limitations of social media’s influence on people’s lives, and which people are or are not susceptible to being ‘cancelled’ and why. If real crimes are amplified less than social media “crimes” (and which, to be clear, I may or may not be right about), this describes something about the nature of Cancel Culture and what sorts of transgressions attract its attention.
Thing is: people have been being “cancelled” for centuries…for being black or Jewish or gay or holding the wrong political or moral views.
What a travesty when wealthy, comfortable members of the majority start having to answer for their views!
