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.
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.