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goto11

I'm not sure how you could "cancel" someone like Crumb. He is self-employed making independent comic books.

But with his oeuvre it is unlikely Disney will hire him any time soon.

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Interestingly, Disney's new Chip 'n Dale movie actually features a cameo of Crumb's Mr. Natural character.

I did an episode on that for my R. Crumb YouTube show, Canonically Crumb. https://youtu.be/6MI9L870sXU

Yeah, I am thinking I don't even know what "cancelling" means.

My working definition:

Canceling is when a person with power experiences social consequences from their actions similar to the consequences a person without power is likely to experience from a similar action.

YMMV.

Canceling happens more often to people with no power, for all sorts of unjustified reasons, and often based on unfounded accusation leveled by people with more power than they have. You just don't read about it, so don't perceive it that way until someone makes up a totally false story about you or someone you know, and tries to get people to stop working with you. The problem with cancelling people had nothing to do with whether or not it's justified; it has to do with setting a pattern where anyone can ruin someone else's life by making up anything, and encouraging people to believe it without checking for themselves.

Usually means trying to disrupt someones employment or have them removed from being able to publish on the internet. These days it's powerful enough if a popular streamer is after you, they can have your domain name provider, email host, phone number provider, and infrastructure hosts shut you down which at that point you are gone.

I still don't get it. Would Serge Gainsborough have disappeared if Twitter were around in his time or would he have just told Twitter to foutre le camp and kept releasing albums?

As the other posters are implying, if you would continue doing what you were doing regardless of the rest of society's acceptance of your behavior, you are relatively immune to being cancelled. It only really works on people who require everyone else around them to help facilitate their actions

That makes more sense. I guess if people are always true to who they are then they have nothing to worry about.

The question is a little different in my mind.

The question is would Serge's record company continue to release albums when placed under pressure. Would French TV continue to allow him to perform there? Would French radio continue to play his albums? Would he appear in French magazines and newspapers.

In those days when Serge was the enfant terrible the answer was clearly yes, they all would and they did. Today, I still strongly suspect they all would, at least in France. But what do I know of it?

How about the "next Serge" if such a phrase can have meaning. The person trying to get noticed with their work using youtube, soundcloud, myspace, their own domain etc. How would it play out if they released something as unsettling as "Lemon Incest" in duet with their under-aged daughter? [1].

Accusation is also a hell of a powerful thing. The prevailing zeitgeist of "believe the accuser" is understandable given historical context but seems to be equally capable of damage to the innocent. It seems someone would accuse something to supercharge the outrage machine and that accusation could even be true. And it sticks impacting that persons' access to something as basic as the financial system even when it seems pretty unlikely that it is true, eg Julian Assange. I guess some people still believe he's a rapist but the accusation has massively impacted his life and work even if it came from someone who literally wrote about the need to take revenge on former lovers. [2] Among a series of other pieces of information that seemed to strongly undermine her accusations. Being "likable" like Matt Lauer and Katie Couric seems to be more important in such things - which whatever one thinks of their relative merits as humans or even as "the accused" it just doesn't quite seem like justice according to law. [3]

So, I think we can only speculate about what would happen in France. As we can if the "next Serge" were born and raised in the USA.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_Incest

[2] https://www.crikey.com.au/2010/12/13/rundle-assange-accuser-...

[3] https://nypost.com/2021/10/01/katie-couric-reveals-herself-a...

Full disclosure: I think I'd cross the road to avoid all of Gainsbourg, Assange, Lauer and Couric. I can't imagine liking any of them at all. The cancelling business bothers me. Law reform seems to me to be the correct place to address shortcomings in the rule of law. The endrun around it will be abused by the powerful against the less so. The importance of the rule of law is that the strongest might not always get their way. As corruption rages, the agents of the strongest aren't your friends the way they claim to be by standing against those who are the objects of the current edition of "the hate" be it 2 minutes or more.

Assange the person can make my skin crawl while I still acknowledge the ideas - he really was more right about the Afghanistan war than what I was reading in the NYT, WJS, WaPo, ToL, Guardian etc. And it really did greatly annoy a lot of people with power and/or money fueled vested interest in a quite different view of that war than the one he was publicizing - and we now know how it all turned out.

I am a Gainsbourg fan. When he pushed the boundaries he was both clever and artistic about it. The rest of the people you mention have no artistic integrity? I don't care anything about them, really.

I don't know, I am on the fence about Woody Allen so I'm probably hypocritical. I grew up liking his stuff and so find it hard to despise him now. "Manhattan" might (now) be his most cringey film but it has one of the best closing lines of any film ("You gotta have a little faith in people.").

Cancelling only works if you depend on gatekeepers to reach an audience. E.g. Kevin Spacey is only cancelled insofar as he will not be hired for any major studio production - but he can still make his own independent movies for his own money.

Gatekeepers will only cancel an artist if they are more dependent on public opinion (i.e. advertising money and partnership) than on the income generated by the artist.

It is difficult to cancel an independent comic book artist because he is not depending on gatekeepers who are sensitive to public opinion.

It depends; the gatekeepers aren't just cultural. If someone gets you thrown off platforms and payment processors that you need in order to establish your independence and run a business, you get cancelled that way.

Only the already-big can become immune to this. If you're no one, small, or medium, you suddenly lose all ability to escape a network of other "problematics", so it becomes your only audience and limits your growth.

I think it's totally possible today, because if you take away peoples' access to payment processors (Paypal, Venmo, Stripe, Mastercard, Visa) and platforms to grow (Instagram, Patreon, Kickstarter, etc) you keep them from getting to a point of gaining legacy, tenure, etc. Crumb can survive as self-employed because he has a name and value that supercedes canceling attempts.

An artist or creator that doesn't have that already is just as vulnerable because they have no weight to throw around. Independence or being underground doesn't matter when you need the same infrastructure as everyone else to survive.

There's little value in cancelling Crumb, because he's not influencing modern media or the impressionable youth, and he's not influencing neo facists. The whole point of cancel culture seems to be hitting the biggest problematic targets and avoiding the whole "don't meet your heroes" dilemma before fans naturally come to that crossroads. It's also a practicing example of "sunlight sanitizes" low ideologies.

Or that's my opinion of it. Good or bad it's here to stay for at least a few more years.

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