"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.
"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.