I'll be honest here, I dislike the cancel culture with passion.
When an angry mob tries to cancel a person there are 3 things that bothers me:
1. The cancellers are judging the past actions of a person with today's values, and are judging the past version of the person as if such person hadn't had already the chance to reflect on their past actions, accept their mistakes and become a better person.
2. The cancellers are becoming paradoxically the epitome of the paradox of tolerance by destroying the ability of others to be tolerant: Agree with us or we'll cancel you.
3. The cancellers are hidden behind the anonymity that their numbers provide, so they can destroy other people's lives with impunity. Cancellers should be held accountable for their actions.
I like how cancellation apologists excuse cancel culture by saying "oh its just people choosing not to associate with rude jerks."
If it were just that then who cares. No, the problem is that a small group of agitators whip a mob into a frenzy of targeted harassment at friends, family, and employers of the person being cancelled, a process that naturally gives no way for the target to defend themself or for the true facts of the situation to even be known. This is literal mob justice.
There are a few reasons I’m particularly concerned about cancel culture. One is that there is a mechanism for me to change laws I disagree with. There’s lots of things I hate about the justice system that I believe are being worked on. But fundamentally, I accept I was born into a particular society, and I’ve implicitly agreed that I need to agree to certain rules.
Cancel culture is mob justice. There’s no mechanism to change it, and it’s totally irrational. In the example, blaming one person for the actions of a family member goes totally against the philosophies I believe in.
Finally, I don’t think we can trivialize the impact of tossing the idea of free speech out the window. Human history is full of particularly nasty examples of what can happen if everybody feels forced to obey a mob.
The strongest objections to "cancel culture" (it's a bad term, but I'm not arguing semantics, let's just go along with it) are procedural.
Because the public often lacks the entire picture, "cancel mobs" are effectively operating a form of vigilante justice with imperfect information. While strictly speaking people do have a right to do so, when "cancelled" people suffer real-world consequences (pressure on employers to fire them, etc.), the entire thing starts getting scary, regardless of the merit of the accusation.
I'd also argue that, for a well-intentioned person, it's tactically stupid to engage in such behavior, because this circus allows truly bad actors to credibly claim they're being unjustly accused.
I'm usually against cancel culture. Except against those that partake in it. I'll admit I feel a lot of schadenfreude when those people get canceled themselves and they're held to their own standards.
I mean, "angry mobs" have always existed as you said yourself. They didn't seep into "adult spaces", they've always been there. We don't need to blame Twitter, the Internet as a whole, anonymous communication platforms or anything else for human nature.
The fight against cancel culture is a fight against people doing things. It's literally that. "Cancelling" is just a framing device for a myriad of behaviors and reasoning behind those behaviors. If this post gets downvotes, "cancel culture". If OP's post gets a bunch of negative comments, "cancel culture".
TL;dr- There's never been an egalitarian, logic-only meritocracy, in human history, and people getting upset that there isn't one is as reasonable a choice as other people deciding to "cancel" someone.
Cancel culture seems to point to the extreme, as in there is no return, there is no atonement, and there can never be forgiveness. I think that completely goes against the general thinking of right and wrong, and has turned cancel culture into a weapon to permanently ostracize people, rather than to correct a perceived wrong.
Promoting cancel culture? Personally I find cancel culture too reactionary and too extreme and irrational. Additionally cancel culture often gets shit wrong and ruins the lives of the wrong people. I would say in this case if you participated in such a mistake you should be the one that's put down.
But let's disregard that. For this specific case you can't even know who to socially condemn. If the law can't determine it how can you?
I think the modern cancel culture outmatches any cancelling happened before. Through the internet, almost any people can get “cancelled” by a large number of people. The current SNS system also amplifies negative emotions like anger, so it’s even much easier to get cancelled. Even when you do the right thing, an excerpt can render you a sexist, racist, etc.
A big problem here is that the fittest to this environment is those who do nothing, since it’s very difficult to satisfy diverse social norms that have relatively small intersection. So I think the cancel culture does oppress the freedom of speech and thoughts, since the internet won’t forget and the mob won’t forgive.
"cancel culture" is about boycotting people for things they did in the past. Nobody can go back and change their past. Even if those people apologize and work to do better, they still get "cancelled" under cancel culture.
My problem isn't with holding people responsible for their actions, but with never letting up on them. If people can't change and relieve the sanctions against them, they have no incentive to change. They might as well just keep doing whatever they were doing.
Who cancels the cancellers of the cancellers? You've hit the nail on the head: Cancellation is not a viable means of stopping criminal calls to violence, and it's pretty much useless as a rhetorical tool. For the former we have a legal system which should be shored up rather than undermined by vigilantism; for the latter we have a democratic political system which, ditto, should be treated with respect rather than undermined by stooping to the same dirty tricks one's political enemies pulled. Which is probably why cancellation usually appears like virtue signalling, since it serves little purpose in either stopping violence or improving the system, let alone convincing anyone but potentially violent imbeciles in one's own camp to holler and mob up on a target of rage for the benefit of whoever controls the mob.
It has nothing to do with justice. No matter how shitty a human the target of it is. It's always just a really transparent attempt for someone to collect "likes".
Who gets "likes" for calling for civil debate rather than attacking the group's enemies?
No one. Anyone who dares to would be cancelled too. That should tell you all you need to know about the nature of intolerance toward intolerance. It's categorically intolerant as well, and it is no longer on the right side of anything.
Please name a single instance of an individual being “cancelled” for anything but bigotry, hatred, violence, or dangerous rhetoric. I’ll wait.
People aren’t being cancelled for speaking their minds. They’re being cancelled when speaking their minds is literally offensive to small and large groups of people.
Almost every time someone is complaining about cancel culture, what they’re really complaining about is being held accountable for the dumb shit they say or want to say.
Also, “shifting social norms”, lol, from what to what, if you don’t mind me asking?!
"Cancel culture" is one of the dumbest fads this year. It's a new, vague name for things that already have a name: boycott, mobbing, witchhunting, censorship, etc., depending on who or how you are "canceling".
Judging by how I've seen it used in social media, it's a loud way to band together and harass someone before bothering to research facts or context, feel morally superior, and at the same time achieve nothing of consequence.
IMO the main issue with cancel culture is when it targets people who are innocent or gives unreasonable punishments for small mistakes. Those being cancelled are tried in the court of social media, where critics attack without evidence or even knowing the accusations. The accused' friends and employers fear being associated with the accused, even if they ultimately get cleared of any wrongdoing, and they can sue for defamation but it won't necessarily work out.
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.
I think cancel culture is much worse for people who are close to the community tgat cancels them than people far removed. This is sorta obvious if you consider how much effect a community can have on someone by cancelling them.
Sometimes cancel culture affects people outside the community. And then everyone is on the barricades. But I think the real damage is being done inside these communities. Essentially the communities lose the ability to be self critical. A lot of these communities are trying to improve the rights of certain people. But this lack of self criticism makes them much less effective at convincing outsiders.
This is especially bad for reaching the people who disagree quite strongly. I think this is part of why the American political centre seems to be empty.
I think cancel culture tends to be somewhat more grounded in sane principles of equality, but the mechanism does make it comparable to far-right mobs. Targets can't really defend themselves and things may escalate into real life. I don't think it's a great loss to discourage cancel culture along with far-right equivalents. A more measured style of discussion is adequate to call out people for being unreasonable or hateful.
When an angry mob tries to cancel a person there are 3 things that bothers me:
1. The cancellers are judging the past actions of a person with today's values, and are judging the past version of the person as if such person hadn't had already the chance to reflect on their past actions, accept their mistakes and become a better person.
2. The cancellers are becoming paradoxically the epitome of the paradox of tolerance by destroying the ability of others to be tolerant: Agree with us or we'll cancel you.
3. The cancellers are hidden behind the anonymity that their numbers provide, so they can destroy other people's lives with impunity. Cancellers should be held accountable for their actions.
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