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.
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.
Oh no not CRINGE, can someone who's 17 please forgive me so I can be back allowed in the cool club???
lol wat
Let me be clearer then: cringe isn't really a good critique and it's childish
Read the critique below the meme then idk
So then read this instead.
I like Mark Fisher, but he's wrong about this.
I like this piece way more, at least the author is playing with the themes and seems like a well-thought and good-faith article. It's bookmarked and will be reading later, thanks comrade
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".