It doesn't have a definition and doesn't need one. It's liberally applied to all forms of "people being offended". It exists in the space between behavior that is legal yet morally unacceptable. Like abject racism. The actual quality of offending is purely subjective and always has been. Someone can be considered "cancelled" when a critical mass of people agree and refuse to support them. This is how every society has existed forever.
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?!
"Something wrong" is the key criteria here. Ultimately, most of the cancellations are differences of opinion, even if someone finds an opinion particularly offensive.
In my experience, no one's opinion changes because he gets punished by some faceless bureaucratic authority. He simply doubles down, because he believes that not only is his opinion correct, but that it has provoked a crackdown from the authorities.
Not every "wrong" needs to be punished or "held accountable." And "cancel culture" itself is sort of a faux accountability, anyway: an angry mob lobbies some bureaucratic authority to deprive an "offender" from his supporters, often on trumped up accusations and with meticulous organization. They could have instead brought up whatever the offense was forever, they could have debated the person, they could have boycotted, all of which at least give the supporters and the offender the chance to think about what happened.
A large part of cancel culture involved excluding the multitude of middle ground positions down to either legal sanction or a few degrees of unpersoning. There are so many more solutions, including maybe just tolerance of statements we find offensive.
Concerted campaigns to discredit someone for mundane “offenses” (which are well within the overton window) especially by coercing employers to terminate the target is not “plain social ostracism” and indeed the people who engaged in this in the past were themselves socially ostracized for their bad behavior.
To be clear, we’re talking about signing a letter endorsing free-speech ideals or Tweeting research on the efficacy of non-violent protest or saying a Chinese word that sounds vaguely like a racial slur.
Further, the term “cancelled” is not a term that the critics of cancel culture invented, but rather it was invented by the early participants of cancel culture.
It seems so obvious that cancel culture and social ostracism are different things that I don’t understand how anyone could confuse them in good faith.
There are 2 types of cancel culture: society "cancelling" people when we discover they are extremely toxic and/or sexual predators, and private citizens getting doxxed, slandered, and sometimes fired from their jobs because of a racist tweet or off-putting remark. The latter is a by-product of social networks, especially Twitter, and it's a real problem with real consequences.
Saying or doing something racist or rude is bad, it should and would probably get you kicked out of a bar or event. But prior to social media, it would not get your entire reputation ruined, and you wouldn't get 50,000 random people to start harassing you. I hope most would agree that this is a disproportionate punishment.
But IMO the larger issue of cancel culture, is it makes people less likely to say edgy jokes or borderline politically-incorrect statements for fear they will also get "cancelled". Then the definition of "borderline" politically-incorrect shifts further left, more and more becomes taboo, and people start to deny facts because they don't agree to societal norms. When reality is taboo, you get real consequences.
We need a grey area, where you can say something which isn't "accepted by society", but it doesn't get you effectively blacklisted everywhere, and it doesn't affect things like job offers. I'm too young to confirm but I assume we had something like this before social media took off. But with everyone connected and very scrutinizing/critical it's starting to go away.
It seems to me that everyone has a different idea of what it means to be cancelled and what the culture is around that. I can be rebuked (an expression of sharp disapproval or criticism), I can be censured (the expression of formal disapproval) I can be given a fine, put in jail, fired from my job, kicked off social media, or any number of things that could be called "cancelled." The people who have recently exhibited a zeal for cancelling people form a group of some sort. I'm not sure who these people are. It's different for different types of cancelling. I'm confused by the whole issue.
I don’t know that we can attribute doxing or death threats to “cancel culture”. It’s certainly unjustified outrage. However, it does beg the question what exactly “being cancelled” means.
This is a mythical view of cancel culture, and it's driven entirely by arseholes who have realised that people are now prepared to call them arseholes.
"I'm being cancelled" they yell, from the front page of a national newspaper.
It's telling that the small number of white people denied jobs because they behave like cunts get all the attention.
The very many people denied jobs because they're women or because they're black or because they're LGBT+ don't ever meet your threshold for attention, do they? Why is that?
The problem, as usual, being that you are trying to describe something with a term where the common usage is just plain bad faith.
Unfairly attacked?
Harassed?
There’s lots of words…the common usage of cancelling is none of them nor what you described. The common usage is what no one in this thread seems to want to admit. And it’s why the same people who cry about cancel culture want to use it’s supposed existence as a reason to actually restrict others free speech.
Being canceled isn't even a real thing. It's just a phrase people use because they have to have consequences when they show their true selves. Some group of people don't agree with you? Show me an example of being canceled then
As you point out, while boycotting someone based on your perception of their opinion is not new, the modality of mass mob boycotts of individuals over things potentially taken out of context is entirely new, and that's exactly what "cancel culture" refers to. The underlying mechanism of Twitter is what gave birth to the term, regardless of whether it's used by haters to justify hate speech.
One other thing that's new, in America, is the idea that speech is less important than people's feelings. Coupled with the new notion that hurting someone's feelings constitutes a form of harm tantamount to violence, this allows proportionality in punishment to be abstracted away. If measures of harm are arbitrary and shifting depending on how much mob traction one particular issue recieves or how sensitive one person happens to be, then proportionality is impossible, and "cancel culture" captures a state where cancellation is the answer to any grievance of any severity which manages to find cultural purchase.
Certainly there is room for some form of group response to bad behaviour. The Will Smith slap is a good example of something that was fairly roundly condemned, and I think we had sufficient evidence from which to form an opinion. Interesting to note the lack of 'accountability' forced on him in this case however.
Not sure where your 'rule of elites' angle into play here, good faith and rationality are things that are debated and roughly agreed upon within societies and institutions (perhaps I do agree with your statement "These are emergent properties that come from free speech"). My point(s) were explicitly that:
- Cancellation often happens with ill intent from bad actors: partisan, one sided policies that don't apply to 'their side'. You'll see little in the way of due process, benefit of the doubt / chairitable intepretation.
- That combined with reactionism and little desire to combat base stereotypes, makes an easily weaponizable army.
I found Jonathan Haidt's description of cancel culture to be on the mark. It's all about intimidation: Not just for the one being cancelled, but of everyone else who's watching. It's a prelude to a wave of self-censorship.
It's a little weird to hear about people being "cancelled" for things that they did. Usually, to me, "cancel culture" is the phenomenon where people are relentlessly harassed for what they said, or in some (rare) cases, where they were ("so-and-so pictured with so-and-so at such-and-such"). People getting in trouble for doing stuff doesn't strike me as a particularly new or unique cultural phenomenon.
I’m just amazed that cancel culture even made it as a core terminology in contemporary US politics. It’s just people saying deliberately offensive things in public, and then complaining that other people who disagree exist and that such people are refusing to be associated with them or their business(es). Real cases where people lose their jobs or reputation because of trial by publicity is actually quite rare.
That's not what "cancelling" is. That's actual harassment and as you noted it's illegal, and people can and do face criminal charges for it.
Cancelling in the way it's being used colloquially is equivilant to "consequences." The vast majority of it takes the form of social media denouncement, boycott attempts, and phone calls stating displeasure with the situation.
The small % of threats and violence are generally the strawman used to denounce the entire concept (which again, is simply the call for someone to face the consequences of their actions)... and generally aren't what people who are inciting someone's "cancellation" are calling for.
If what you're saying was true, there'd be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people being charged with harassment and criminal threat as a result of "cancel culture"... and there's no evidence of that happening, it's a few outliers just like anything else.
It's a term that describes how people feel to pressure to conform to a certain popular view and they are hesitant of speaking their opinions. Depending on the context, they might be worried about being excluded from a social group, losing friends, losing social status, or getting literally cancelled (in the case of a celebrity in the entertainment industry). The term "cancel culture" broadly describes this feeling and it's not related to actual consequences (if any).
At least this is how people use it. You could argue it's an inaccurate term since there are no actual cancellations in most case. But the prevalence of this sentiment is still noteworthy imo.
What? This event seems to match the collectively assigned definition fine.
"Cancel culture or call-out culture is a modern form of ostracism in which someone is thrust out of social or professional circles – whether it be online, on social media, or in person. Those subject to this ostracism are said to have been "cancelled". The expression "cancel culture" has mostly negative connotations and is commonly used in debates on free speech and censorship.
The notion of cancel culture is a variant on the term call-out culture and constitutes a form of boycotting or shunning involving an individual (often a celebrity) who is deemed to have acted or spoken in a questionable or controversial manner." [1]
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.
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 exactly the example of what you're talking about though. There ARE consequences for people who say socially unacceptable things on social media, so much so that it has its own phrase in our lexicon now.
How many times has some famous, or non-famous for that matter, person faced backlash because of something they said on social media? It's such a thing that there's an entire episode of Family Guy about it, where Brian gets cancelled and people stand outside his house telling him to kill himself for making a bad joke on Twitter.
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