>The fact is that there are certain occasions where "canceling" seems fine, and others, where it does not.
To me, this hints that the concept is a convenient tool to own people over social media or use in political attacks for rallying a voter base. There isn’t anything new here except people being shitty to each other. Anything else from it is what you normally get with reputation damage (justified or not).
Once we get rid of the annoying exercise of trying to define cancel culture, there’s some real action items we can talk about regarding reputation/livelihood damage for dumb things being said. Any reason to revisit that is because of technology’s reach now and how seemingly easily it can happen, not that cancel culture is a new thing.
> These days it might be possible to "cancel" someone for something that they didn't even say/do
It always has been. And, often the “cancelling” has been total and irreversible, not, as it often is with the “cancel culture” of recent complaints, just a reduction in current popularity with a particular segment of society (frequently accompanied by profitable celebrity status with an opposing and at least roughly equivalent power social group.)
In fact, those complaining about modern “cancel culture” often make hyperbolic analogies to these historical, more total cancellings, such as lynchings.
> Aside from that, "cancel culture" feels quite a vague topic
A good, frustrating point. A large proportion of complaints of cancel culture are coupled with implications of frustration that they feel they can't say unpleasant things that they would have gotten away with previously. Or people complaining about direct efforts to change social norms that they don't agree with, claiming that due to a status quo bias, change is cancellation and therefore baseless.
As with most ideologies, discussing the definition is a fairly pointless task because its subjective and ill-defined, especially by those who feel passionately about it. The term is pointless. What happened in this case sounds bad, at a glance. Let's not generalize it to other things. It'll get nowhere. Whether or not one believes something is a part of cancel culture has no bearing on whether a particular idea to squash something is good or not.
> Where are the statistics on this? How many are actually impacted by it?
It's a real problem, but mostly just for the sort of people who might sign on to a letter such as this: elite think tankers, academics, and columnists, who would love nothing more than to be able to continue spouting unsubstantiated nonsense with impunity.
If your livelihood is throwing opinions into the Internet wind, then of course cancel culture is an existential threat. As these sorts of people now tend to be extremely online, every little barb and retort pains them disproportionally, too.
For most of us, it's just a distraction. If you're not famous on the Internet, you can't be canceled to begin with.
> 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.
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.
> Why do you need me to name a person impacted by cancel culture? The discussion shouldn't latch onto one person's particular situation. I have enough empathy in me to believe that some people impacted by cancel culture regret their actions, and are given no opportunity to make amends, and I think that's toxic and it encourages people to be further more toxic, because they're given no other option than to double down. Cancel culture is a very new phenomena and is not as old as electricity or democracy.
I think the issue here is that you haven't given any clear explanation of what you believe "cancel culture" to be, and seem unwilling or unable to give a single example of it.
Without an example or at least a clear explanation, it's hard to evaluate your concerns about people "given no opportunity to make amends". For instance, I recall pewdiepie said the N word on stream and got some backlash, apologized, and moved on with his very popular channel. Is that cancel culture?
> It is very much NOT limited to public figures and is pervasive in large companies.
That is not cancel culture. That is something else. Cancel culture, by definition, requires something that can be cancelled. Equivocating the two issues is an attempt to make public figures, organisations, etc less accountable.
> Is this a “the first as tragedy, then as farce” type of deal?
Definitely. First, cancel culture emerged as a response to genuine concerns about social justice and equity, particularly with regards to marginalized communities. Cancel culture initially sought to hold people accountable for their harmful actions and words, and to create a more inclusive and just society.
However, over time, cancel culture has increasingly become a farcical parody of its original intentions - it has devolved into a tool for online mobs to attack individuals for minor or unintentional offenses, resulting in a culture of fear and self-censorship.
Cancel culture has also been weaponized by some to silence dissenting opinions or to settle personal scores, rather than to advance social justice. See: https://rms-open-letter.github.io/ for a recent example.
>I think the issue may be that you're defining cancel culture in a way that's very different than what most people in general, and in this thread, do. That's not wholly your fault, but it does mean that the conversation probably won't be fruitful.
Just to be clear, I'm using a definition that I did not come up with on my own. Cancel culture doesn't have one definition. I linked a video where T1J kinda covers this. He's not a definitive source, but at least two people are confused by this definition.
Examples => I've got to google it. The best example I can think of was the lady who got on the flight and when she landed she didn't have a job. Her tweet was taken out of context, and while made in poor taste still.... kinda lame.
Other examples would be the google memo guy (kind of a reverse order firing iirc), the maga hat kid, the lady from brookfield zoo, and the manager at Chipotle off the top of my head.
Google some examples of this. Should you post stupid things to Facebook/Twitter? No you shouldn't. Should you get fired for it? I'd lean to the no side more than most people I'd guess. I think free speech is important, but companies have the right to fire people.
Is it the end of the world? In most mild cases, not so much. But there are some more extreme cases where there are much more long lasting effects to people. We don't typically hear about it unless the cancellation is something that was taken out of context and some people feel bad for the person being canceled. A lot of times it's just someone getting fired.
> people who are complaining about cancel culture are complaining about people not liking their spicy takes
This is oversimplification.
There’s quite a difference between “not liking” and ruining career, denial of access to services etc.
Part of the problem is that only small group of people really “don’t like it” but capable of cancelling, and vast majority of people are happy to just ban that person in their feed and go on with their life (and large number of people are actually open to opposing views).
> What I notice about the "cancel-culture" debate is that it predominantly seems to define culture as being the sphere of the people who can be cancelled to begin with.
Yeah, and to a certain extent those people have also been "canceling" people for their views a long time, but the people they canceled didn't have a platform to complain and be heard.
> I think the root of the problem isn't cancel culture but the limitation of the political to a bunch of celebrities....
> If however political discourse is the job of the professional commentariat and the rest of society is some sort of passive mob waiting to be activated, sure then you get cancel culture.
I think you're probably right about the root cause, but that's going to be a really tough problem to solve. A corollary of your observation is the ability of "rest of society" to participate in productively in "political discourse" seems to have atrophied. It's going to be a difficult problem to fix, and a lot of things we take for granted (like national media that gets all the attention) will probably have to change to fix it.
> So all that being said, I genuinely wonder if cancel culture is here to stay
Insofar as “cancel culture” describes actual behavior rather than the ideology motivating it, it's been a constant part of society, from all ideological angles, for, approximately, all of human history. Shunning the heterodox is not new.
The only thing new is the right’s use of the term “cancel culture” to disparage this when it bites them; this replaces “political correctness”, which served the exact same purpose for the right from the 1980s until “cancel culture” became the new hotness.
I get the impression that the term "cancel culture" can mean anything that anyone wants it to mean, and it ends up becoming amorphous complaining about random grievances real and imagined. (Kind of like the imaginary "War against Christmas", where Christmas is cancelled because some people choose to say "Happy Holidays".) Regardless, I would personally make a distinction between "I was fired because of X" and "My friends don't like me anymore because of X". I don't think it's useful to have one term that covers these two very distinct things, and also I don't think the latter is worth having much of a public debate about.
It's difficult to take "cancel culture" too seriously when many self-described victims of cancellation were simply criticized. They seem to think any form is criticism is bullying and ostracism, and that everyone has to duty to be accepting of their obnoxious opinions.
> Cancel culture arises from a structural change in the dynamics of social interaction facilitated by the development of social media.
So it's not an extension of shunning, which has existed in human cultures for as long as we know?
It's not a form of boycotting?
I find it very hard to believe that this suddenly arises from nothing other than social media. That does make it easy to solely vilify tech, though . . . another common "woke" behavior these days.
> Like any kind of social ill, if you rewind far enough you can find a time when it was common, but at least in my lifetime it was never normal or valued.
Keep in mind social media has drastically amplified the attention we point on cancel culture. Both the "cancelling" itself but as well as people talking about it. Perhaps that has also increased the amount of events happening, but it doesn't mean it hasn't existed (see Boycotting above).
> Like everything, opposition to cancel culture is political for a sufficiently broad definition of "political".
You have to be able to define what cancel culture is first. As my little story pointed out, there is nothing I can do as a business to recourse clients not buying my product as a result of an employee getting "canceled".
> Maybe the more interesting question is whether it's partisan
Maybe, but trying to assign a political party to the use of its weaponry you're only further creating a divide and therefore creating partisan. In other words, if you conclude that the left/right they're using cancel culture they'll only dig their heals in more and project that the opposite side is weaponizing it.
> Similarly, there are folks on all sides who oppose cancel culture.
Ultimately the fact that there isn't a commonly accepted definition regardless of political affiliation is what holds us back from either eliminating it or accepting it as simply free market principles.
They cause massive damage to other people's lives over what's essentially wrongthink.
> Who's in charge of "cancelling" exactly?
Organized internet mobs, often from Twitter. Look up Sleeping Giants for an example.
> Is it just fear of losing your job
"Just" losing your job? That's a major life-changing punishment by itself. They can ruin your reputation and essentially blacklist you.
These people essentially run a denial of service on your life and that of your family by denying you income for the crime of offending them with your thoughts. In a way, they're a self-righteous Kiwi Farms.
> who makes that call? HR? Executives?
Whoever's in charge. They will be intimidated into firing you for your offensive conduct or suffer the same consequences for supporting and aligning themselves with such an abominable wrongthinker.
> 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.
I think it's the opposite: if you got cancelled previously—Walmart, Barnes & Noble, etc. stopped selling your book perhaps—you'd simply disappear into a memory hole. Nobody would have a way to find out about it, so nobody would know to care. Now at least other people may find out about it, and you can make a stand to fight back.
> since the internet won’t forget and the mob won’t forgive
The internet forgets plenty, and whether the mob's forgiveness even matters depends on whether your audience is in the mob.
Except cancel culture is anything but community driven. It's social media driven -- which in itself is a platform to get more views to sell you more ads. The more the platform can draw your ire, the more ads it sells, the more ire the platform spreads, etc.
The problem is that words aren't which we argue our politics by anymore. It's now who has the biggest weapon to personally destroy those that speak out.
> It's not clear to me the difference between "cancel culture" and legitimate outrage.
Legitimate outrage is "I think an opinion you currently hold or thing you currently do is bad, so I'm going to try to cut you off from society until you walk back the opinion or stop doing the thing."
Cancel culture is "I think an opinion you once held or thing you once did is bad, so I'm going to try to cut you off from society forever, even if it wasn't considered bad at the time, and even if you've since walked it back/stopped/apologized."
In a nutshell, cancel culture is refusing to forgive.
To me, this hints that the concept is a convenient tool to own people over social media or use in political attacks for rallying a voter base. There isn’t anything new here except people being shitty to each other. Anything else from it is what you normally get with reputation damage (justified or not).
Once we get rid of the annoying exercise of trying to define cancel culture, there’s some real action items we can talk about regarding reputation/livelihood damage for dumb things being said. Any reason to revisit that is because of technology’s reach now and how seemingly easily it can happen, not that cancel culture is a new thing.
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