Is "Cancel Culture" really more complicated than "we should hold people accountable for shitty things that they have said/done in the past?" or am I missing something?
I like Cody's Showdy's take on it in the "Cancel Culture Isn't A Thing, You Snowflakes" episode of SMN, which is basically that unless a person apologizes or otherwise makes amends their career will suffer, at worst, a minor hiccup.
However, I have heard that sometimes non-powerful and/or famous people get "cancelled," and these people don't get a chance to apologize or make amends in any kind of meaningful way, which can kill their career prospects. This seems like a valid concern to me, but A) I only heard this from someone on reddit and haven't done any research into it myself and B) when people talk about "Cancel Culture" it almost exclusively seems to be referring to famous people that have the means to continue supporting themselves during their cancelled hiccup.
What did the podcast have to say about all this? Anyone got some CliffsNotes for me?
"Cancel culture" as a concept is incredibly annoying because it's conflating several real things to create a fiction that's entirely used as a shield or bludgeon by reactionaries:
you have the actual "cancel culture" the term was originally coined to describe which is insular in-groups maintaining cohesion by ostracizing and harassing individuals within them for real or perceived transgressions, something that's a real phenomenon and which has been a persistent sort of toxic behavior basically forever and is probably a core part of how insular in-groups form and function.
on a larger scale you have people being ostracized and harassed for going against the social norms of their community, which historically has mostly been things like persecution of LGBT people, leftists, and anyone who wasn't racist but which now sometimes applies to racists and other bigots too, and this also is just something people do and whether it's good or bad is 100% dependent on the target and reason.
then you have institutional silencing of people by either state actors or other institutions of power, which again historically has been targeted at LGBT folk, ethnic minorities, and leftists because most institutional power on earth is and has been in the hands of reactionaries, and this is another case where it's not the act of silencing but who and why that's important in determining if this is ok or not (for example, the US blacklisting and murdering civil rights activists was and is bad, but the Soviets silencing monarchists and fascists was good).
and then there are people who entirely depend on social capital for their income, which is to say whose commodity is something that entirely relies on people liking them and purchasing it or otherwise supporting them, and they lose that when the people they rely on stop liking them on account of their words and actions, and again the who and why are really important here because the reasons can vary wildly from "they literally committed violent crimes against someone" to "they said racism is bad and now the Gamers are trying to murder them via cop."
So overall you have an amorphous, meaningless label that boils down to little more than "for some reason some people don't like this person very much now, and they might be doing something or nothing because of that," but which some people inexplicably try to unify into a bogeyman cultural movement that's somehow an existential threat, generally the same people who are very concerned about "the terrorist organization A.N.T.I.F.A. LLC" which is an equally fictitious thing.
Great insight, thanks for sharing. Never thought to consider the history of the term.
So overall you have an amorphous, meaningless label that boils down to little more than
This reminds me a lot of the definition of feminism, or social justice, or even Antifa; the term has become so nebulous in the public sphere that 5 different people arguing about it all have 5 different definitions that they are arguing for or against, all the while assuming that everyone else has the same definition that they do, which is usually not the case. Like you said, discourse gets watered down until it can be used as a shield or bludgeon by whomever is wielding it.
The term is also thrown onto targeted harassment of random people who make themselves vulnerable in some way, either by real or perceived transgressions. Remember that lady who posted "hope I don't get AIDS, oh wait I can't I'm white" which is absolutely a self-effacing bit making fun of racist white people, not making fun of brown people.
But on the surface it kind of sounds racist, so a bunch of couch potato freaks realized they had the power to just psychotically destroy someone's life for sport, and she was fired before she even got back on twitter and saw the kajillion replies.
That's another one that needs its own name - all these separate concepts need their own differentiators.
Citations Needed did like a 20 minute news brief about cancel culture which was way more thought-out and nuanced than the hours they've spent talking about it on Chapo.
Is “Cancel Culture” really more complicated than “we should hold people accountable for shitty things that they have said/done in the past?” or am I missing something?
Pretty much no. There's some cyberbullying happening, but they keep mixing that shit up with canceling people for their shitty behavior, which doesn't even really mean fucking anything
However, I have heard that sometimes non-powerful and/or famous people get “cancelled,” and these people don’t get a chance to apologize or make amends in any kind of meaningful way
sometimes kinda "internet famous" people get actually cancelled
one that comes to mind is Adam Koebel, stopped streaming and youtube because of it, got dropped by roll20 as a professional GM and lost contracts
"After suffering some damage, Johnny stopped by an old friend’s place to get fixed up. Instead of performing the requested repairs, that old friend — a non-player character (NPC) performed by Koebel — committed an act of sexual assault. You can watch the scene play out on YouTube, where an archive of the livestream remains." - Source
I'll agree that this seems like kind of a weak reason to cancel someone. This was also just several months ago, so hopefully he'll be able to pivot to something else soon.
But I guess this brings up the fact that in any kind of movement like this there will inevitably be some people that unjustly end up in the crosshairs. It sucks, and I don't really see any way to prevent mob mentality from allowing that to happen to certain people, but is that also enough to justify rallying against the entire movement as a whole? (Not trying to say you are trying to cancel Cancel Culture, btw, just trying to understand the mindset of those kinds of people.)
“After suffering some damage, Johnny stopped by an old friend’s place to get fixed up. Instead of performing the requested repairs, that old friend — a non-player character (NPC) performed by Koebel — committed an act of sexual assault. You can watch the scene play out on YouTube, where an archive of the livestream remains.” - Source
yes, i'm aware, i watched it live when it happened
I wasn't much of a fan of Adam, him being a very privileged vagueleft scab, but holy shit, twitter people were acting fucking psychotic
Is “Cancel Culture” really more complicated than “we should hold people accountable for shitty things that they have said/done in the past?” or am I missing something?
Watch Cancelling by ContraPoints if you have a hundred minutes to kill. Per her usual, Contra gives a nuanced/multifaceted understanding of the question, though since the episode's about people trying to cancel her, she focuses more on the problems with it.
TL;DW She platformed (gave a tiny voice role to) an older generation trans activist who was groundbreaking in his time, but has recently been intolerant of non-binary people (which apparently the people who make ContraPoints didn't know about at the time). The result was a cancelling campaign against ContraPoints AS WELL AS friendly BreadTube channels like Shaun who refused to condemn her. She also gives examples of people who committed suicide due to being hounded online and others whose transgressions were exaggerated by a kind of game of telephone.
Personally, I think the ability of ordinary people's opinions to affect the lives of celebrities overall is great - it is accountability and democracy.
However, there's one more problem with it (in addition to the kind of mob/vigilante/disproportionate justice problems highlighted by ContraPoints) - the ability of establishment media platforms to weaponize it. The Twitters/YouTubes/Facebooks are evil fucking machines and the drive to have them censor certain 'bad people' gives them a power they shouldn't have, because they will (and already do) abuse it to censor figures that the powerful don't like. Someone somewhere will get a campaign going to cancel someone who offends the powerful for some relatively minor mess up - and then the powerful will cancel them, in the name of some persecuted group.
In conclusion, cancelling is good - except for the cases when it isn't, so people should be cautious and think veeeery carefully before doing it to someone.
Is "Cancel Culture" really more complicated than "we should hold people accountable for shitty things that they have said/done in the past?" or am I missing something?
I like Cody's Showdy's take on it in the "Cancel Culture Isn't A Thing, You Snowflakes" episode of SMN, which is basically that unless a person apologizes or otherwise makes amends their career will suffer, at worst, a minor hiccup.
However, I have heard that sometimes non-powerful and/or famous people get "cancelled," and these people don't get a chance to apologize or make amends in any kind of meaningful way, which can kill their career prospects. This seems like a valid concern to me, but A) I only heard this from someone on reddit and haven't done any research into it myself and B) when people talk about "Cancel Culture" it almost exclusively seems to be referring to famous people that have the means to continue supporting themselves during their cancelled hiccup.
What did the podcast have to say about all this? Anyone got some CliffsNotes for me?
"Cancel culture" as a concept is incredibly annoying because it's conflating several real things to create a fiction that's entirely used as a shield or bludgeon by reactionaries:
you have the actual "cancel culture" the term was originally coined to describe which is insular in-groups maintaining cohesion by ostracizing and harassing individuals within them for real or perceived transgressions, something that's a real phenomenon and which has been a persistent sort of toxic behavior basically forever and is probably a core part of how insular in-groups form and function.
on a larger scale you have people being ostracized and harassed for going against the social norms of their community, which historically has mostly been things like persecution of LGBT people, leftists, and anyone who wasn't racist but which now sometimes applies to racists and other bigots too, and this also is just something people do and whether it's good or bad is 100% dependent on the target and reason.
then you have institutional silencing of people by either state actors or other institutions of power, which again historically has been targeted at LGBT folk, ethnic minorities, and leftists because most institutional power on earth is and has been in the hands of reactionaries, and this is another case where it's not the act of silencing but who and why that's important in determining if this is ok or not (for example, the US blacklisting and murdering civil rights activists was and is bad, but the Soviets silencing monarchists and fascists was good).
and then there are people who entirely depend on social capital for their income, which is to say whose commodity is something that entirely relies on people liking them and purchasing it or otherwise supporting them, and they lose that when the people they rely on stop liking them on account of their words and actions, and again the who and why are really important here because the reasons can vary wildly from "they literally committed violent crimes against someone" to "they said racism is bad and now the Gamers are trying to murder them via cop."
So overall you have an amorphous, meaningless label that boils down to little more than "for some reason some people don't like this person very much now, and they might be doing something or nothing because of that," but which some people inexplicably try to unify into a bogeyman cultural movement that's somehow an existential threat, generally the same people who are very concerned about "the terrorist organization A.N.T.I.F.A. LLC" which is an equally fictitious thing.
Great insight, thanks for sharing. Never thought to consider the history of the term.
This reminds me a lot of the definition of feminism, or social justice, or even Antifa; the term has become so nebulous in the public sphere that 5 different people arguing about it all have 5 different definitions that they are arguing for or against, all the while assuming that everyone else has the same definition that they do, which is usually not the case. Like you said, discourse gets watered down until it can be used as a shield or bludgeon by whomever is wielding it.
The term is also thrown onto targeted harassment of random people who make themselves vulnerable in some way, either by real or perceived transgressions. Remember that lady who posted "hope I don't get AIDS, oh wait I can't I'm white" which is absolutely a self-effacing bit making fun of racist white people, not making fun of brown people.
But on the surface it kind of sounds racist, so a bunch of couch potato freaks realized they had the power to just psychotically destroy someone's life for sport, and she was fired before she even got back on twitter and saw the kajillion replies.
That's another one that needs its own name - all these separate concepts need their own differentiators.
Citations Needed did like a 20 minute news brief about cancel culture which was way more thought-out and nuanced than the hours they've spent talking about it on Chapo.
Pretty much no. There's some cyberbullying happening, but they keep mixing that shit up with canceling people for their shitty behavior, which doesn't even really mean fucking anything
sometimes kinda "internet famous" people get actually cancelled
one that comes to mind is Adam Koebel, stopped streaming and youtube because of it, got dropped by roll20 as a professional GM and lost contracts
"After suffering some damage, Johnny stopped by an old friend’s place to get fixed up. Instead of performing the requested repairs, that old friend — a non-player character (NPC) performed by Koebel — committed an act of sexual assault. You can watch the scene play out on YouTube, where an archive of the livestream remains." - Source
I'll agree that this seems like kind of a weak reason to cancel someone. This was also just several months ago, so hopefully he'll be able to pivot to something else soon.
But I guess this brings up the fact that in any kind of movement like this there will inevitably be some people that unjustly end up in the crosshairs. It sucks, and I don't really see any way to prevent mob mentality from allowing that to happen to certain people, but is that also enough to justify rallying against the entire movement as a whole? (Not trying to say you are trying to cancel Cancel Culture, btw, just trying to understand the mindset of those kinds of people.)
yes, i'm aware, i watched it live when it happened
I wasn't much of a fan of Adam, him being a very privileged vagueleft scab, but holy shit, twitter people were acting fucking psychotic
Oh I wasn't trying to explain it to you; I didn't know who he was and was just sharing what I found for anyone else who also might be unfamiliar.
Twitter mob gonna twitter mob, I suppose. Sometimes people just want blood.
Truer words never spoken, though it must have sucked harder for him seeing people who were close to him add to the pile on
Watch Cancelling by ContraPoints if you have a hundred minutes to kill. Per her usual, Contra gives a nuanced/multifaceted understanding of the question, though since the episode's about people trying to cancel her, she focuses more on the problems with it.
TL;DW She platformed (gave a tiny voice role to) an older generation trans activist who was groundbreaking in his time, but has recently been intolerant of non-binary people (which apparently the people who make ContraPoints didn't know about at the time). The result was a cancelling campaign against ContraPoints AS WELL AS friendly BreadTube channels like Shaun who refused to condemn her. She also gives examples of people who committed suicide due to being hounded online and others whose transgressions were exaggerated by a kind of game of telephone.
Personally, I think the ability of ordinary people's opinions to affect the lives of celebrities overall is great - it is accountability and democracy.
However, there's one more problem with it (in addition to the kind of mob/vigilante/disproportionate justice problems highlighted by ContraPoints) - the ability of establishment media platforms to weaponize it. The Twitters/YouTubes/Facebooks are evil fucking machines and the drive to have them censor certain 'bad people' gives them a power they shouldn't have, because they will (and already do) abuse it to censor figures that the powerful don't like. Someone somewhere will get a campaign going to cancel someone who offends the powerful for some relatively minor mess up - and then the powerful will cancel them, in the name of some persecuted group.
In conclusion, cancelling is good - except for the cases when it isn't, so people should be cautious and think veeeery carefully before doing it to someone.
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