The internet is enabling a new norm in reducing the cost of calling out behavior.
Some of this is good, e.g. calling out sexual abuse. Some of this is bad, e.g. cancel culture that has no means of forgiveness.
Some of this is good, e.g. calling out sexual abuse. Some of this is bad, e.g. cancel culture that has no means of forgiveness.
Since HN is amazing, I'm hoping someone here can help me understand without it turning into a flamewar.
I don't understand how "cancel culture" is substantially different from what we used to call "boycotts", just with the internet for more social lubrication.
I suppose theres a risk that the allegations at the center of the boycott are incorrect, but isn't that what defamation laws are meant to combat?
The origin of the term boycott was a landlord's agent called Charles Boycott, who was socially and economically ostracised in response to the eviction of tenants.
I guess overall for "cancel culture", I see it similar to boycotts, but often boycotts edit are /edit of a specific individual, and also without the stipulation that the boycott will stop if a behavior changes. AFAIK, the civil rights bus boycotts wanted a specific policy to change and once that policy changed, they stopped their boycotts. Much of "cancel culture" I guess wants an organization's policy to change, but often that policy is to excommunicate an individual and there doesn't seem to be much that the individual can do to seek redemption—but I may be wrong on this.
Would love to hear your thoughts in response.
I hadn't considered the sort-of agenda that boycotts tend to have.
I bet a lot of cancels also have a salient agenda, but since the movement is so democratized it gets lost in the noise. Just a gut feeling.
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You lost me a bit on:
> Much of "cancel culture" I guess wants an organization's policy to change, but often that policy is to excommunicate an individual...
I've been conceptualizing the cancel as individuals choosing to not support creators, but this makes it sound like theres a third-party involved. A sibling comment mentioned people repeatedly calling Disney.. am I missing something here?
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I've been involved in one cancel before, so heres the frame of reference I'm coming from:
I like an artist named DojaKat.
A while ago a video surfaced of her singing a song with a racial slur in it.
I saw the video and said to myself "Oh man, I don't want to support a racist artist, this sucks, but I don't think I should stream her on Spotify anymore (In my mind, that was the cancel).
Some weeks later, DojaKat released a video in which she apologized, talked about how much she's grown as a person, and promised to do better. It seemed sincere to me, so I added her work back to my Spotify playlists.
Am I correctly interpreting that as a cancel?
So, unless you sent DojaKat death threats or tried to have her fired/have her l7income taken away, I don't see a boycott like that as the same as "cancel culture" at all.
I appreciate this point. I think sometimes these waves of calls for cancellation play into larger movements that have more clearly defined goals, such as #metoo, which I think focused on shedding light on sexual violence/abuse/harassment and to get individuals and organizations to create more policies to prevent it from happening. Maybe when I think of "cancel culture" I think less of the underlying structural goals of it, but you've helped me step back to think of that.
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I think a lot with the call to "cancel" someone (I don't know why I feel compelled to put it in quotes but I keep doing it) is often to specifically tell the organization(s) to remove the individual from participating. E.g., wanting Netflix to fire Kevin Spacey in House of Cards (and other Hollywood production firms to no longer hire him), wanting radio stations to ban R Kelly's music, etc.
So I think it's the idea that for a person to be cancelled, someone has to do the cancelling.
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I guess for me, I wouldn't see that so much as how the phrase "cancel" is being used in the "cancel culture" idea. Yours seems to be you, the individual consumer, doing the cancellation, and also you being open to giving her a second chance through forgiveness.
I see a "cancel" of DojaKat in this instance being people demanding that her record company, her agent, TV stations, radio stations, and others agree to break relations with her and when she apologizes, to not forgive her and to not give her a second chance.
So in summary, I see "cancel culture" as more about trying to rally others, especially groups and institutions, to break off relations with that person (or sometimes a group) and to do so permanently.
I personally don't like it because I believe much more in restorative justice than I do retributive justice, and I also believe that by distancing ourselves from these people, through the power of the internet, they may find other people who feel alienated and cancelled and they could form into more and more radicalized groups.
This cancel culture stuff is about not just "not reading the article and not going to the site", its an active attack against someone that you don't like.
A boycott is me saying "buzz feed sux, i won't goto one of t heir urls". Cancelling would be me saying Gina Carano sux, i'm gonna call disney over and over until she gets fired.
I don’t see the material difference there, what about it being an individual makes you feel it’s different?
Your last point is intriguing to me.
If I were to simply not watch films with Gina Carano in them anymore, would you still say I’m canceling her?
I’m still curious if me choosing to not watch films with problematic individuals in them would be considered cancelling or a boycott?
I guess I'm not sure I see the difference here. complaining about what gina carano says on her twitter is, in a roundabout way, complaining about a disney product. disney didn't fire an actress from one of their popular shows because they got tired of listening to a small group of people complain; they did it because enough people complained that they saw a potential loss in future revenue. this looks a lot like a boycott to me.
See, this is something I highly doubt. Do you think that there is such a large part of Disney public that does give a damn about what Gina Carano says? I don't think so. I want to count the ones who actually stop watching "the Mandalorian" because of Gina Carano's tweets. My bet is that they're so few they'd feel stupid after two weeks and start watching it again.
I think the issue here is that taken one by one, each of those who have the power to take decisions succumb to peer pressure and fear of being targeted next. Everyone is replaceable, so everyone prefers to keep on the safe side when confronted by people who are aggressive, determined, and always ready to escalate the pressure to the the next hierarchy level or to to start working out the weakest peers.
So the bottom line is that if the targets of these attacks just stood their ground united and told the mobs to fuck off, the cancellers would just vaporise in a couple of weeks.
Or comments taken out of context or missing nuance.
Or punishment out of proportion to the offense.
In the past, boycotts were aimed at corporations. Not buying or consuming a specific product, or protesting that company. Cancel culture is more aimed at individuals.
Suing for defamation can be expensive and risky, and doesn't necessarily restore reputational damage even if you win.
Obviously, some people clearly guilty of the accusations against them and deserve the consequences being meted out against them.
But there is also a long history of "witch hunts" and people being punished in ways that don't deserve. Social media is enabling a new form of that, which is what we call "cancel culture".
This isn't remotely new, though. For one very visible example in our industry, Lynn Conway got fired for coming out as transgender. Similarly, Turing was canceled for being gay. Politicians have been getting canceled for marital infidelity for most of my life (and, wow, Trump really modernized the Republican party on that one). Not to mention the McCarthy era, where people got canceled over suspected affiliation with leftists.
There's a huge panic about how cancel culture is destroying the world... but the difference is that people today are getting canceled for exhibiting intolerance and bigotry, instead of getting canceled by the intolerance and bigotry of those in power. And, yes. There are certainly cases where the cancellation is disproportionate to the offense. But compared to Harvey Milk, Martin Luther King, and many many others canceled in the past... there's nothing new here, and historically speaking, this sort of cancellation is pretty soft.
Cancel culture is also distinct from politicians and infidelity because cancel culture targets non-public individuals. Of course politicians and celebrities were always subject to public opinion; the modern era now means that everyone can be targeted this way, even if they weren't known at all before (Justine Sacco is a simple example).
The McCarthy era was again a matter of government action through government processes with at least some level of transparency, democratic representation, and accountability. It was not spontaneous mobs of individuals without leaders or any kind of accountability. (They also targeted communists, not just 'leftists').
It's ironic you say casually that "people today are getting canceled for exhibiting intolerance and bigotry", when cancel culture is itself intolerance and bigotry. The standard definition of bigotry is "extreme intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own." [0]
[0] https://www.thefreedictionary.com/bigotry
It's also always disturbing to encounter people like you who are openly clear that cancel culture is just like historical persecution, but you're totally fine with it because you (wrongly) think it only happens to bad people. As though only people you like deserve to have human rights.
Where I think of people who have been cancelled I only think about celebrities.
Reading about Justine Sacco’s story was interesting. Do you know where I can learn more about private individuals being cancelled? (Googling only brings up celebs)
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...
Also any number of academics, who wouldn't normally be considered celebrities or politicians:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/08/professor-sus...
https://mobile.twitter.com/sooppressed/status/12824046471609...
I feel a real urge to say, for the record, that I don’t consider myself strongly “anti-cancel culture” or whatever, just that I understand the skepticism towards it and think that it’s referring to something that exists and at the very least has amped up since the end of the Bush administration. Although, truth be told, I doubt that’d be enough if my turn comes, and maybe all that just proves the anti-CC people’s point.
I'm reading through the articles now, and have concerns that the author is over editorializing at least some of them.
I know for a fact Kindness Yoga is doing fine, I walk past there daily.
> 2. A yoga studio that was so woke they had gender-neutral bathrooms and person-of-color yoga nights where “white friends and allies” were asked to “respectfully refrain from attending” has closed down due to racial accusations.
That was a lie. Kindness Yoga didn’t close down. So I’d advise others to take the thread author’s words with a grain of salt.
The news article from June 29th it links to says that they'd be shutting down, and the tweet was less than two weeks on. I found another news story from July 10th [1] - two days before the tweet went out - repeating the intention to shut down permanently, and another from August [2] that affirms that a shutdown happened. So at the time the author of the thread was in good faith relaying the truth.
I can't find any news stories indicating that it reopened, so unless you expect the author to live in Denver or be following closely every single example he provides months after the fact, I don't think this is a reasonable criticism.
ETA: Actually, their social media appears dead since June; Yelp shows many locations closed, and the locations it doesn't show as closed have, uh, poems written in memory of them...so I'm wondering if it actually did shutdown and you're not just mistakenly thinking of/talking about a different yoga studio entirely.
[1] https://theknow.denverpost.com/2020/07/10/denver-yoga-studio...
[2] https://theknow.denverpost.com/2020/08/07/courageous-yoga-bi...
I'll grant that it's more likely a mistake than an outright lie.
I'd still recommend that you read what the thread author says with a grain of salt as they aren't corroborating the claims they're repeating.
If you dig into the sourcing if the Colorado Sun's article, it cites an Instagram post[1] as evidence the business is closing, but the post says no such thing.
In that post, they announced that they will be closing, with the proximal cause being a surge of cancelations immediately after the accusations. I cannot copy paste the text as its within the images.
Edit: "...I have decided to close Kindness Yoga." Previous slide uses vague, passive, avoidant language to reference the accusations.
Cancelling is much more democratic than policing, or the writing of laws. Nothing forces anyone to join in, everything is voluntary, and the cancelling only works when people agree. There is also no undemocratic way to get around it. Weinstein can pay of investigators, judges, journalists, and jurors, but he can't pay off everyone on the internet.
Similarly it's transparent - cancelling comes from specific instances of stuff. Screenshots, links, videos, etc
The big thing that's different between cancelling and historical persecution is that it's targetting people that used to be able to attack single points of failure to avoid being held accountable.
They should be happy it's not like historical persecution because when mobs used to get together to attack the rich, heads used to roll. Now the mob is content with making them not rich
There is no real majority of people involved in canceling someone. It’s just a mad Twitter mob with a Pareto distribution where most people are content with posting mean tweets to virtue signal, and only few who go as far as calling up people’s workplaces to get them fired. It does not involve anyone beyond the mob, and even within the mob most aren’t willing to go very far. Yet it is the actions of only a few extremists that produce most of the mob’s impact. To call that democratic shows that you don’t seem to realize a world outside of your bubble exists, or should be acknowledged.
Cancel culture is basically softcore terrorism, and fittingly, portions of your rhethoric are not unlike a justification for terrorism.
You've hit Popper's paradox right on the head. Sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia are examples of intolerance. Fighting those values, and criticizing/boycotting their champions, is not. This is the bright line between what the right decries as "cancel culture" of today vs the "cancel culture" of yesteryear.
> It's also always disturbing to encounter people like you...
So, you're making assertions about opinions that I hold, not based on opinions that I've stated, but upon those of "people like [me]." This is not a good-faith approach to conversation.
As Popper wrote, his conception of 'intolerance' was not "sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia". In fact, none of these words had even been invented when he was writing!
Popper was very clear that he conceptualized 'intolerance' as people who will use violence and force and power to silence others. This he was specifically referring to intolerance of other beliefs, whether religious or political. This is exactly the kind of intolerance you are committing.
Please read what Popper actually wrote about the paradox before misrepresenting it - I see this error all the time.
>you're making assertions about opinions that I hold, not based on opinions that I've stated, but upon those of "people like [me]."
No, just about opinions you plainly stated - that you think cancel culture is cool because only people on your list are getting cancelled.
How were the perpetrators of McCarthyism held accountable?
"With the highly publicized Army–McCarthy hearings of 1954, and following the suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester C. Hunt that same year,[12] McCarthy's support and popularity faded. On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to censure Senator McCarthy by a vote of 67–22, making him one of the few senators ever to be disciplined in this fashion."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy#Censure_and_th...
"We have some power so we're gonna do it now, why you so mad" is pure antisocial behavior.
Any movement based on diversity, celebrating differences etc cannot afford that look.
for me, personally, it's when your average joe gets the other end of internet mob justice and they suddenly seek to ruin everything about your life above and beyond what you would normally face.
Some arguments I'm familiar with around cancel culture are below. My goal isn't to assert them -- just enumerate some of them. People are welcome to reshape them or knock 'em down as they see fit.
- The Internet is a global namespace: now you can have people anywhere in the world outraged. What used to be a localized problem and response can now turn into a localized problem, but global response.
- The ability to go back-in-time is all too easy. That dumb comment you made as a teenager can come back years and years later to haunt you (or people close to you). Maybe you had a massive turn-around already or you were recorded without consent. Often that doesn't matter.
- It is fostering an insidious call-out culture. The focus is no longer on prevention and remediation, but on scoring points and repositioning power towards "the vanguard". Legitimate victims aren't helped to heal and offenders aren't led to improve.
- No room is given to defend yourself, particularly when mobbed upon. Even if the record is set straight later it doesn't matter, as your reputation (possibly friendships, career, and family life) is in tatters.
What I do feel worth asserting is this: no matter what the current norm is, always remember you will be judged according to later standards, right or wrong. The greater the disparity in power the more important this is regardless of role (e.g. boss, parent, etc).
And your call out at the bottom is good wisdom :)
Edit: this->these
- Virtue signaling is a critical component to personal and social moral growth. Showing where you stand and putting your money where you mouth is necessary to decentralize authority and improve the standards that are "baked" into society. Otherwise you're just appealing to whoever has the biggest stick.
- That people misapply a legitimate action or are overzealous in its application doesn't mean the underlying idea is wrong. The Internet is still quite young and its inviting a global confrontation of how to deal with deeply-seated social problems. Expecting this new-found power to be wielded without making mistakes is unrealistic.
- People are learning how horrible it is to rely on power and privilege to isolate you from the effects of your wrong-doing. Even if we assume the best of people and that they aren't consciously doing this, it is still pushing awareness closer to consciousness and thus (hopefully) better decision making.
- The importance of allyship is making massive strides. As oft quoted, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.". On a personal note, as a kid watching a neighborhood kid get his bully-buddy to stop throwing snowballs at another kid taught me a lesson I've never forgotten.
- "Good" and "bad" deeds always have a "blast radius" and require support of some kind to sustain. Engaging organizations and platforms that surround people is a critical component to making a change, or all you're doing is swapping the hood ornament on the car without touching the engine underneath.
I was under the impression the virtue signalling specifically requires insincerity.
For example, if you inject yourself into a conversation to lecture everyone about what a great ally you are (and you don't even really mean it), that is virtue signaling.
If you try to make it all about yourself, and assert completely risk free opinions that challenge nothing, that is virtue signalling.
Simply sharing and asserting your values doesn't have to be virtue signalling.
> - That people misapply a legitimate action or are overzealous in its application doesn't mean the underlying idea is wrong. The Internet is still quite young and its inviting a global confrontation of how to deal with deeply-seated social problems. Expecting this new-found power to be wielded without making mistakes is unrealistic.
Nobody objects to the underlying idea of witch hunting. If there were actual witches that were using magic powers to poison the town, of course we should have an inquisitor to hunt them down.
This has only ever been a discussion about tactics.
I think there are lot of loaded words in our political vocabulary and their meaning can have subtle (or even significant) shifts based on who uses them. If "virtue signaling" includes a connotation of insincerity, and that aspect changes everything entirely as you show.
I used it in a more strictly technical sense, but I think it fair to say that with most language the neutral, technical version is the least common in actual usage.
-- Context is irrelevant. People are being canceled for using the wrong word when enumerating words which cannot be said. again, some people can say them, some can't.
-- it is completely out of proportion to things which do actual damage. This really bothers me. Someone saying something really bad means less to me than even the mildest act of violence
-- some places are upping the ante to claim that speech is actual violence and that if certain people aren't fired, then the workplace is unsafe
Apparently, that is a prerogative of only group Y nowadays.
But what seems problematic for me is when institutions react to random outrage groups (which often are very vocal but small groups) on social media by blindly joining in the outrage and rapidly severing ties with people (firing them, removing authors, etc) without a serious investigation of what - if any - actual wrongdoing there was, what were the circumstances, etc. I would expect some semblance of due process instead of "just" doing what the crowd says immediately for PR reasons.
Joss Whedon is a showrunner and filmmaker, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame. A few years ago while going through a divorce, his ex-wife alleged that he had sex with female staff on one of his shows. This lead to allegations that his demeanor on the set of Justice League was snide and unprofessional. Which lead to former Buffy and Angel actors coming forward, and alleging that Joss called an actress "fat" when she got pregnant almost 20 years ago.
James Cameron is a filmmaker of Titanic and Terminator fame. He has been married five times, notably to filmmakers he's worked with and actresses who worked on his films. Some of his divorces have been attributed to affairs with other actresses under his employ. He is a notoriously angry and difficult director to work for, and on the set of The Abyss he was punched in the face by an actor who was nearly allowed to drown because Cameron didn't want to spoil the take.
Joss Whedon is effectively canceled. He has been forced to step down from a new show he was developing for HBO, and his fanbase on various Internet forums has viscerally turned against him.
James Cameron is an Academy Award winner, one of the most marketable brands in the entertainment industry, and everyone will be lining up to watch Avatar sequels over the next few years.
For me personally, the inconsistency and near-randomness of it all is just... unsettling.
Cancel culture is wanting to punish a person (or virtue signal) for something in the past. Maybe they deserve it - I get it more when there's a history of credible charges of sexual assault or something (but then, I'd prefer they be tried in court and punished via the legal system). But the bar seems to have lowered and now you get fired for a tweet people don't like. And maybe people have the right to do it, but that doesn't mean it's always a good idea. If we're not careful it takes over the role of rule of law in our society and will do a worse job of it.
In the recent case of Gina Carano specifically, I don't think her tweet is remotely offensive to the level of being fired, and the effect will be that she's given a voice and seen as a martyr by people who have far more extreme opinions than what she's voiced previously.
People have gotten kicked out of colleges for using racist words in text messages. People have been fired for their jobs for messages taken out of context. Non-public individuals start getting death threats online and they get called out in the streets, for small mistakes or things taen out of context.
A separate issue is that people sometimes get cancelled for things that happened a long time ago, sometimes even when they were still young. The issue here is that people change. It would be like boycotting a company because 20 years ago they exploited workers, regardless of whatever they're doing today. It's a really grey area.
Cancel culture typically refers to instances of the third option, someone saying something mean and having his life ruined for it. A good example: a guy's business was ruined because his daughter wrote some mean things online as a kid. https://forward.com/news/448382/the-ceo-of-holy-land-hummus-... They were certainly bad, and her parents ought to chastise and punish her for them. But neither she nor her father should face "cancellation". I feel just as sorry for her; she may never get into college or get a good job because of this. These weren't "injustices"; no man was harmed.
Cancel culture usually targets an individual. The objective is typically not change in policy, but the ostracism of the target.
E.g. refusing to buy from Nike until they pay better wages to their manufacturing labor is a boycott. Pressuring a company to fire a certain employee because a group doesn't like the political views of said employee is cancel culture.
Now your career can end because “You encouraged too much forgiveness for a girl who attended the wrong kind of party at 18.”
With a boycott, the intent is to change the organization's behavior. Once the organization stops doing the thing you don't like, you can stop the boycott. Problem solved.
But with canceling, there is an assumption that people have a deeper, immutable character. They are canceled because of an act or acts they have already done, and the cancelation is intended to be permanent based on the assumption that those acts reveal who the person really is and that we can never trust that they won't do those acts again in the future.
Part of the justification for this is that canceling a person sends a signal to other people "don't be like that". The canceled person is considered irredeemable but an accepted casualty to root out a societal ill.
It's also important to consider what people are being canceled from. This is a sanction mostly applied to celebrities and politicians. These people are not being ostracized from all society—they can still go to the grocery store. They are being kicked out of the high prestige realm they were a member of.
In that sense, it's maybe more acceptable that the sanction is permanent because they're only being kicked out of a club, and not left to die alone in the wilderness.
I like an artist named DojaKat.
A while ago a video surfaced of her singing a song with a racial slur in it.
I saw the video and said to myself "Oh man, I don't want to support a racist artist, this sucks, but I don't think I should stream her on Spotify anymore (In my mind, that was the cancel).
Some weeks later, DojaKat released a video in which she apologized, talked about how much she's grown as a person, and promised to do better. It seemed sincere to me, so I added her work back to my Spotify playlists.
Am I correctly interpreting that as a cancel?
I mean, I'm no authority on any of this. But my impression is that most of the high profile cancelations I've seen have no attached list of demands at which point the person is considered to have made amends and can return to their previous stature.
> Am I correctly interpreting that as a cancel?
Unless you were publicly telling other people that they shouldn't stream her then I wouldn't interpret it as any kind of "cancel". We're all free to stop consuming from anyone for whatever reason we like. That's not canceling people, it's just having a preference.
At the same time, I'm sure the individuals who are opting to not support could conceivably be swayed back into supporting the creator in most cases.
I guess my point is that theres a de facto list of demands in most cancels, you just don't see them because theres no central authority to reiterate it.
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I didn't tell other people to stop streaming her, but I learned about the video and chose to boycott because other people were telling me to do so.
If I had posted on Facebook: "I saw an old video where DojaKat used an offensive racial slur, and have thusly chosen to stop consuming her music. Here is the video for your reference"
Would that have constituted cancelling? I'm just expressing my preference to my friends, no?
I was with you up until here. This is blatantly wrong. Regular people are being cancelled all the time. Besides, people in prestigious positions deserve due process just like anyone else. Cancel culture intentionally circumvents any semblance of due process or fairness.
The use of feedback and machine learning (even simple mechanisms) in social media to selectively show the most engaging content has, in my opinion, been a fundamental cause of cancel culture. Cancel culture requires "moral outrage", and enragement is engagement, so Twitter (esp) is a factory for moral outrage.
This is fundamentally different from boycotts in the sense that boycotts were "organised", "led", or "stirred up" (according to your pov) by people. For example, anti-Nestle campaigners collecting petition signatures. There's a real world cost, a responsibility to be taken, a time lapse.
In contrast, moral outrages are manufactured almost autonomously by curation algorithms that are constantly searching for engagement. Outrage happens to be one really good strategy for that. The barrier to participation is extremely low - just click here, type an optional tweet dunking further on the target if you wish - and the speed they can spread is fast.
Compounding this is the propensity to be outraged has increased, I think, partly because "engagement-rich" modes of thinking have been spread. I'll resist giving concrete examples to leave the discussion politically neutral.
I really think there's an awful lot of responsibility for this problem on the social media companies and their leaders.
Boycotts are conducted by people with an existing relationship with the target.
Boycotts are usually seeking to inflict financial damage, rather than primarily reputational.
Boycotts are addressing an issue directly, cancel culture is addressing systematic issues with selective enforcement.
Boycotts are trying to change the behaviour of their target, rather than make an example out of them or as punishment.
Boycotts are typically temporary, not permanent.
Since theres no central authority enforcing a cancel, how can it be permanent?
How many times has Kanye West been "cancelled"? It seems to me everyone forgets about having cancelled him whenever he releases a new album ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And it makes sense to me, since cancels are done by disconnected individuals, a cancel ought to only last as long as the cancelling collective's attention span.
More targeted and more often aimed at specific individuals.
As a side effect of the above, it is much easier to devolve into harassment and worse crimes than when it was a business that was being boycott.
More access to data to cancel on. Much easier to take information out of context now that social media exists.
Cancels also take on characteristics of a meme. A given behavior may lead to a cancel attempt while far worse behavior by others is ignored. There is a lack of rhyme or reason that pairs up with how some things become a meme and other similar things do not.
What is considered worthy of being canceled has increased to include many actions that the majority does not feel comfortable cancelling over, but given the previous changes a smaller group is needed to convince HR that someone should be fired.
On the one hand, I've known of all sorts of ridiculous and unbalanced leftist moral outrage misdirected to individuals rather than the broader system (which is what leftists are supposed to oppose).
On the other hand, I feel like the phrase "cancel culture" itself has become an ill-defined catch-all used to attack an ill defined group of people - a situation that mirrors these misdirected leftist attacks.
“Cancel culture” is what, after about four decades of nonstop use, the Right has done a search and replace in their canned narratives to replace “political correctness” with. With exactly the same complaints and descriptions of the nature and effects, including the continuous argument that it is new.
Maybe that’s following a YouTube rabbit hole and now you’re unintentionally watching flat earth or politically radicalizing videos. Maybe you internalize that content which you otherwise wouldn’t have consciously decided to watch had you not been led there.
A sibling comment refers to cancel culture as democratic. That would be great if it were deliberate and rational. But I wonder how much canceling stems from a similar, for example Twitter-centric, pipeline to the YouTube flow above?
Informed, justified, and deliberate canceling as the voice of the people sounds great and I would very much be behind that. But I worry that an increasing portion of the mob is comprised of people led to outrage not by choice but by social media dark patterns.
Do you have a source on a country that legalized gay marriage without social networks? I’m not saying it can’t happen but that would put a dent in my theory. I think Taiwan had it happen before FB but they have what I would consider social networks before we did.
Taiwan was very recent - 2019.
I'll grant that none of these were before the internet but there's nothing uniquely special about gay marriage that required the internet for organising, a huge amount of activism was done in person, just like in various other civil rights movements in assorted countries pre-internet.
So I might still have a point?
Same thing if you think about the #metoo movement, all it took was a tweet for the world to start moving, whereas it took a woman to kill herself in France in 1944 for women to get the right to vote.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage#Timeline
1. China 1,394,015,977
2. India 1,325,349,639
3. US 329,484,123
4. Indonesia 272,856,400
5. Pakistan 233,431,156
6. Nigeria 213,986,428
7. Brazil 212,041,332
8. Bangladesh 162,532,538
9. Russia 142,588,206
10. Mexico 128,840,997
The thing that matters more is GDP/capita