Here's the thing: I don't think cancel culture exists, at least not in the form that is popularly disseminated. I think that cancel culture is one of two things, both of which are lumped together as an evil phenomenon.
Branch one is people rightfully getting called out and shut down for their goddamn idiocy. Justine Sacco is a great example, because she posted a dumb racist joke and then got fired. Why'd she get fired? Well, would you, if you were a person of color, want to work with a stupid person who makes racist joke? Maybe, maybe not. It's a liability for the company. See ya, dipshit. This is not a left thing, though. This tends to be led on Twitter by progressives, liberals, and unaffiliated decent people who are outraged by bigotry.
Branch two is weaponized discourse by the right. They plumb the depths of someone's social media and find shit someone said from years ago, remove context, sometimes even fake stuff, and they try to get people fired. Usually they target public media figures. You rarely see them going after a day-to-day person like a Justine Sacco. You see them go after James Gunn.
There are other, unaffiliated things that aren't part of cancel culture that also happen and they're their own boxes of rocks.
One example would be deplatforming, which the left definitely has done for idiots like Milo Yiannopoulis (as he tweeted here ). Ultimately they weren't even the ones who canceled him--see branch two. But leftists protested him and his tour where he threatened to out trans and undocumented students like a real piece of shit.
Another unrelated example would be targeted harassment. It's lumped in with cancel culture but it seems to be mostly about terrorizing marginalized people in public forums. JK Rowling bitched about being shouted at by trans people when she said horrible stuff, and a small sliver of unaffiliated people took that moment to say fucked up stuff to her about sexual assaulting her, but it would be extremely, extremely disingenuous to say that's representative of the majority of responses she got, let alone members of the trans community.
In short no one can tell me what the fuck cancel culture is, what its consequences are, or anything but it's pretty clear it's just a tired revival of so-called PC culture hysteria to paint reasonably asking neoliberal goons like Bari Weiss to fuck off as some sort of witch hunt.
You’re made a fucking pariah if you’ve served in the military, or if you’re like, a white person with a mohawk or dreads, or just like a cis-het dude trying to get involved and learn.
In what community? I haven't seen this at all and I've literally been online for far too long.
If there even is such a thing as CC, it's treating human beings as TV shows; as commodities to be cancelled, to be taken out of one's view. As such, it is ultimately just another phenomenon of Capitalist Realism, of reducing interpersonal relationships and society at large to market logic.
No one can even define for me what the fuck it is. What's the parameters? What does it mean to be 'canceled'? What are the consequences?
For sure. I think that's because the word itself has become a staging ground for the culture war at large.
They use the term like in the '90s how politically correct became vilified
I think everything that needs to be said about cancel culture was already said in the Citations Needed episode on the Harper's Letter.
https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/news-brief-the-harpers-letter-and-our-extremely-narrow-self-serving-definition-of-cancel-culture
Chomsky is such a dumbass for signing that fucking thing, and also I'm angry Matt Karp did it too although I'm not surprised to see someone Jacobin-adjacent doing it
Have you seen Chomsky recently? He doesn’t look like he’s doing well. Really looking a lot worse for wear in the past year. He’s still at it, but I really wouldn’t be too surprised to find out he’s gotten less sharp
Oh he absolutely was tricked into signing it but I'd be suspicious over who asked him. Since, uh, this happened.
When I listened to this, it really crystallized how I’d been feeling about this whole “cancel culture” thing for a while but hadn’t figured out how to word. I think the fact that the people raising the most hell over it are also, funnily enough, some of the people with the largest platforms in the world–like neocon ghouls and JK Rowling–tells you all you need to know about this whole thing. “Cancel culture” is what the privileged few scream when those they’ve been systematically silencing for years manage to actually get their voice heard for the first time. These people have no conception of being silenced because you risk being fired, you risk your own security, You risk your identity being made public, or even just the lack of time and energy between jobs to say things. To these people the worst fate imaginable, being “silenced”, just means losing even a modicum of their class privilege and power and being forced to engage with the commoners.
As much as cancel culture is discussed, I have never heard a suggestion about how to fight it. Is the plan to just convince people to stop criticizing other people? That doesn't seem likely to work. Is it to stop companies from firing people who have been cancelled? They are doing it out of self interest, good luck stopping that. Is it censoring criticism? Surely that would be worse than anything cancel culture could do.
Cancel culture rhetoric is condensed liberal weakness: endless criticism with no solutions offered.
Is the plan to just convince people to stop criticizing other people?
That's literally what most of them seem to want, yes. Or freedom of consequences for their bad ideas.
I've had a drunken screaming match with one of my friends on a midnight subway ride who couldn't comprehend why Black Lives Matter. It honestly took some time, but they're a smart, cogent person (just not very academic), but with enough prodding and massaging, she finally came around to understand and even attended some protests.
Contrast that with one of my Facebook college mates who baits people online, screenshots their "All lives matter!", digs into their history to find their employer, and makes a public post encouraging others to brigade and demand blood. (He's brown and gay, so I get where his anger and righteousness stems from... but also your classic lib with a six-figure software engineering income who's invested in a gentrified neighborhood). To some, that's praxis. From a utilitarian perspective, it's just empowering the fascists waiting on the sidelines to lovebomb and further inculcate them into their ideology.
So yeah, cancel culture exists. I just think given how many testimonials from converted chapos I've read over the years who were blinded into the fasc pipeline means we should hold out and not lump the misguided in with the misguiding.
Hillary/Buttigieg-stan. You want his social security number next?
Read Exiting the Vampire Castle by Mark Fisher https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/
I have, it's absolute garbage. In fact this is a great counter, to start.
Imma be real you just posted cringe.
That article barely addresses anything Fisher talks about or addresses them out of context. It seems like most of what Fisher was talking about goes over the head of the author. Fisher talks about the reassertion of class, not class domination over the other important intersectional issues, which he does talk about in his piece. I could dismantle this "learned treatise" if I had a bit more time and maybe tonight I'll post something, but honestly this is not a great critique of Fisher or his framework posited in Exiting the Vampire Castle.
As a brief aside, the fact that this piece ends with "The Vampire Castle seems like the better place to be" is outright hilarious.
Imma be real you just posted cringe.
Oh no not CRINGE, can someone who's 17 please forgive me so I can be back allowed in the cool club???
Let me be clearer then: cringe isn't really a good critique and it's childish
So then read this instead.
I like Mark Fisher, but he's wrong about this.
My one and only takeaway from Fisher's article was that an atmosphere wherein the failings of community members are sought out in order to bring those members lower, to mark them as bad or tainted; rather than one in which those flaws are combated and the people made better for it is deeply corrosive.
I think that's a pretty good lesson, specifics about academia or identities notwithstanding.
This is the very same corrosive atmosphere, I think, that Matt Christman has associated with Twitter, the "anti-dialectical space".
