Righteousness drives cancel culture. Power structures and capitalism have nothing to do with it.
Historically communists literally cancel people by imprisoning them and sending them to re-education camps or worse.
Today's virtue signaling by corporations is no different than it was twenty years ago when Janet Jackson slipped a nip at the Super Bowl. Advertisers threatened to leave NFL. FCC opened an investigation. All of this to please what these corporations perceived as the majority mob.
In order to fire someone, you need power. In order to fire someone based on vague accusations or how they worded a tweet, you need a complete lack of labor rights.
edit: in the US, it's completely legal to fire people because you don't like their taste in shoes, or because you're so attracted to them that you think you'll be tempted to try to cheat on your wife. I don't think we should have a carved out protected class for employees who sounded transphobic on twitter once. We should have a minimum process for firing people that is dictated by the state, and further process that is negotiated by the employee's union. "Free speech" libertarians hate that a lot more.
In order to send someone to a gulag, you need power. To disappear someone based on vague accusations or how they worded a tweet, you need a complete lack of human rights.
Socialism as a cure for Capitalism is a case of the cure being far worse than the disease.
You technically can but it requires pretty fantastic conditions as prerequisites right now. Theoretically if it was known that obeying lead to better outcomes than anything you could do on your own people would follow them without coercion.
Actually being that right on their own would be difficult for the same reasons it would for a command economy period, and proving it enough to gain followers would be difficult but it would be possible.
Give a reliable "crystal ball" and predictions always being clear and right where those that obey see outcomes accordingly the sensible would start to follow the commands without any force behind it. There is no need to use force to punish jumping off of a cliff essentially.
It implies the reason it depends upon authoritarianism is because as a model it cannot compete.
I think the answer there is that the anti-mask-wearers and anti-vaccinators might not know that obeying leads to better outcomes. (they're almost certainly wrong, but that's still what they know)
This won't be a very popular response, but: generally the answer to this has been to question the framing of authoritarianism. Marx spoke of a society in which labour is no longer alienated, but "man's prime want". His assumption (true or false) was that people wouldn't be need to be pressured to work. His claim was that in capitalism, itself an authoritarian system descended from previous class systems, authority lurks behind free rights and duties, in which he commented that under capitalism the worker must be free - free to sell his labour, and free from the means of production.
In summary, to anti-capitalists the question is not only how to have an economy without authoritarianism, but also how to rework the very concept of labour, how it is thought of, practised, etc.
What is it about labour in class societies, they ask, which means that it can only be seen as something which needs to be compelled, either by holding the means of survival (a wage) over the worker's head, or by placing them in a state-industry job for labour tokens? Both the capitalist and 'socialist' solutions are authoritarian. Why?
Unfortunately a lot of the popular discourse around Marx's actual works has been obscured or discounted. Yet it is impossible to validate the USSR, Cuba, China, etc. as 'Marxist' or not without knowing what he wrote himself. It's just as rare to find a leftist who's read Marx as it is to find a right-libertarian who's read Marx.
As someone living outside of the US I find it interesting (and perhaps a bit predictable) how the normal response is something in the lines of "If you do not want capitalism, you want communism". This form of polarized view is false dichotomy, much like choosing with horn of the bull to be speared by. There might be other ways of handling the bull.
From my point of view there is a whole spectrum of things in between these two opposites.
I see full unfettered capitalism as harmful as I consider full blown communism. They're both totalitarian systems just with different masters and propaganda.
Social democracy as done in much of Europe is in between the two (or at least used to be when I grew up). It tries to respect basic human rights such as housing and health care, while still allowing corporations to do their thing. Controls imposed on corporations tries to ensure that they don't go completely bonkers in search of the almighty profit.
> In order to fire someone based on vague accusations or how they worded a tweet, you need a complete lack of labor rights.
Not really: "I'm sorry, it's now clear that your values are out of alignment with the company values. While your work here has been effective, we can't justify the harm your value misalignment is bringing the company."
What on earth does a lack of labor rights have to do with capitalism?
Labor can be -- and often is -- unprotected in all economic structures. A laborer in a communist state has historically had very few labor protections.
Right. Capitalism doesn't "drive" cancel culture any more than it drives other cultural developments of all sorts. People have always sought to take advantage of cultural and political shifts, and this is no different.
Righteousness lies in the eyes of the beholder. And often nowadays, the disconnect is in how much righteousness-attention is placed on specific topics in relation to others, dependent on what's in-vogue politically.
> In the United States, diversity training is worth $8 billion a year
That explains a lot.
Otherwise, great article tackling in a very thoughtful manner a delicate topic. But still preaching to the choir. Nobody who should learn anything from this will because as the article itself explains, it goes against their motives.
Edit: to be clear, not saying the article is pointless, it gives a voice to those who might be too afraid to speak the facts these days. And it serves as a "you are not alone, nor crazy".
I've gone to an executive leadership training on gender equality (a cause I fully endorse) that was lead by women mostly sidestepping the structural causes to gender oppression.
I find this kinds of activity more damaging than silence since they give a false sense of progressiveness.
This is especially damaging with race issues, most places I worked at people were happy to discuss sexism but literally sighed at racism.
BTW "diversity" is code for quotas. For example, Harvard in the early 20th century justified Jewish quotas because Jews academically were outperforming the existing WASPs as a population and thus overrepresented for the overall population.
When SATs were introduced which serves as a means for objective academic testing, Jews became about 1/4 of the Harvard student body well overrepresented compared with the proportion of the population which at the time was 2-3%.
Now it is happening to Asians where there are quotas compared with academic achievement, particularly in Asian males.
Many universities such as Harvard and Princeton are doing away with SATs for the current year ("because of the pandemic")which will allow them to reintroduce or maintain quotas. I fear that they will keep with the practice.
Cancel culture is one of those things that is so nasty, so obviously unproductive, that it makes me sick to see how broken our culture has become. I mean, I was sure that society had definitely concluded that mob justice was a bad thing. Discovering that I was wrong was difficult.
Regardless of the virtue of off-color jokes, thousand-year-old religious viewpoints, and fear-based worldviews, we must admit that we've lost sight of the goal. To quote an Aaron Sorkin 'Republican': "If liberals are so fuckin' smart, how come they lose so godddamn always?"
You can just imagine being a young employee fresh from college, or a blue-collar dude just working on a show, when bam! suddenly you're out of a job because of a tweet you had nothing to do with. The alt-right is waiting there with open arms. Why does nobody see how that works? It's like a college fair where one group of tables is telling you how much you suck and the others are high-fiving you for what you've already done. Guess who gets the candidates?
The problem is, "cancel culture" has come to mean two very different things: Punishing, even firing, people because of relatively innocent statements or actions misinterpreted, taken out of context, or blown out of proportion; and ostracizing or shunning people, primarily public figures, for revealing their bigotry and hateful beliefs.
The former seems to be what you're describing, and is, IMO, caused by people with little power in a world they feel is spinning out of control trying to exercise control over the spaces they do have power over. It's definitely a problem, and is definitely counterproductive to efforts to improve the inclusivity and compassion of our society.
The latter is, as some people have described, simply speech having consequences, and those consequences being upsetting to people who are used to being treated as authorities.
Education system should innstill those principles. In many ways it has tried, but you still meet people of all ages ignorant of their own intolerance and general lack of sound principles. Not everyone is a philosopher, and the world wouldn't be better for it, though we need more robust platforms to build our structures on.
This article borders on incoherent in terms of how meta it tries to get about responses to social justice activities.
I think the author should read, “Inequality Talk is About Grabbing” and “Sex Prizes” by Robin Hanson and reflect soberly on what they mean about society’s motives.
Cancel culture is about selfishly taking resources, that’s all. There are many things we could try to cancel that would make the world better, but why is it that it tends to only focus on removing someone from a position of (usually pretty menial) authority or influence, like a job or a high status social media outlet.
Cancel culture isn’t impacting overt horrific actions of billionaires. We don’t tend to try to cancel across international lines, or cancel people from the past, because we can’t take resources from them.
It’s purely about taking whatever stuff you can smash and grab, like social looting, from people positioned with menial wealth, power or influence, in your own country for the most part.
Anyone who can resist you is somehow conveniently not a worthy target.
We also don’t try to take things that aren’t easy to grab. It’s super easy to remove statues or cancel someone on social media, or get people in the middle ranks fired.
This is why you also see calls for direct cash payment forms of reparations even though that utterly makes no sense on any level whatsoever. Direct cash payments by grabbing tax money is one of the easiest things to grab. Real reform that addresses systemic addiction, gang influence, employment gaps, police discrimination, etc., are extremely hard to solve and require complex coordination. So of course conveniently major op eds are written defending direct cash reparations as the only solution.
I really wish people would wake up to this more.
The world around you is constantly trying to drum up covert hypocrisy reasons why it’s OK to simply take what you have and why this isn’t wrong.
The target on your back is a function of what stuff you have that they want, and how easy it is to take it from you.
Lower middle class doesn’t have much, so nobody focuses on taking from them. People in other countries are separated by complex laws so taking their stuff is hard. Very wealthy people have resources to resist so taking their stuff is hard. People from past eras are dead and locked their stuff away in institutions, so taking anything aside from symbolic gestures is too hard.
This leave you - upper middle class or low end of the wealth class. You have just enough stuff for it to be worth grabbing, and you don’t quite have enough power to resist social movements that take it from you under the guise of social progress.
Despite you being downvoted, I appreciated your post. I especially find the idea of "social looting" interesting, and I agree with you about the path of least resistance being the middle class--we're easy targets, it seems.
Movements are built off the back of small victories. It's not a surprise or a revelation that what you paint as 'cancel culture', a concept without personification, is exercising its (limited) power in the ways you describe. It seems likely to me that, as victories accumulate, so will the socio-political power of the group, until they are capable of making serious change at the level of nation-states.
I think you misunderstood. These aren’t “victories” in the sense of having any impact on reform or progress - they have none, not even a little, and the people doing the cancelling never expected or needed them to.
It’s only about taking what you can grab. The goal is to get more stuff while not being accused of violating social norms during the act of taking. So cancel culture is invented as an excuse of convenience that allows taking stuff on one hand while claiming moral righteousness (even though your only motive was to take peoples stuff you wanted) on the other.
If you wanted social reform, there are many actions you could choose that aren’t directly rooted in terms of who are the easiest people, with sufficiently valuable stuff, to take from.
The fact that people choose to focus on social looting instead of all the rational alternatives is what really conclusively demonstrates that cancelling is not at all about pure motives to fix things but instead is just about what can you get away with taking while protected under the righteousness banner of the social movement convenience excuse.
Dicing and slicing society into groups based on sex, gender and race and then creating a hierarchy amongst the groups is what initiated cancel culture. It amounts to the proletariat fighting amongst themselves for the table scraps, while the owners of capital are generally off-limits.
All of it amounts to a slight of hand in the fight for economic equality.
Isn't assuming that the axis is by economic equality in itself a divide and conquer based upon assumed affinities while ignoring every other source of divergence like fundamentals of world view?
It isn't like a Crips member can just ignore that the Aryan nation has genocidal views towards them and focus on the police as a common enemy because they are of the same economic class. Claiming an affinity there is like saying Goebels and Churchill should have gotten along splendidly because they were both conservative white men in power who spoke germanic languages. It really doesn't work that way.
They get the direction of agency completely wrong. Capitalism /responds to/ so called cancel culture of all sorts which by accident or design excludes ostracism well before it was coined.
Be openly gay, socialist, and/or in an interracial relationship in the the US in the 1950s - compile a very short list of places you aren't canceled from.
The framework doesn't exist in a vacuum and blaming it for its host context's dysfunction would be incorrect even if it excaberrates them in some way. Because it isn't the origin.
Capitalism driving cancel culture would be if it was possible to invest money in ostracizing someone and reaping financial benefits if it suceeds or ostracism being preferred because it is cheaper than a police force.
This is a great piece. It provides a clear framing to interpret how institutions (and individuals) act when faced with social injustice. The article cites several interesting cases to make the point: the injustice itself can be very real, or it can be just something "assumed" but magnified by social media.
The author argues that there's an important distinction between socially vs. economically radical (re)actions to injustice. The socially radical approach is relatively easy to follow through but also quite ineffective, or even counter-productive (e.g. appointing the first female board member in a corporation, or instantly fire an employee who's been blamed on social media). On the other hand, an economically radical reaction is costly but can lead to real change (e.g. stop selling to a business partner who violates our own values).
And, as the article points out, leaders of institutions typically have personal incentives to follow the "soft" version: making some PR moves without caring too much about the real problems.
If we look at the IT sector we had several examples of this lately [0-4].
As others (some heavily downvoted by now) commented, free market capitalism - that is, whenever there's no state involvement - makes it impossible to profit from such actions (one has to pay for irrational behavior).
Here's a historical tip. The bad guys never believe they are the bad guys. Maybe everyone should use that nugget to keep yourselves in check before you get some Taco Bell worker fired for saying something that offended your delicate sensibilities.
Current cancel culture is nothing but infant stage fascism. People with power hate to lose it, so they will sacrifice whomever they need to in order to keep it.
If you don't think cancel culture rhymes with McCarthyism, maybe you're the bad guy.
- https://mobile.twitter.com/BerrakBiz/status/1276320815240208...
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