Senate Has Cancel Culture Gone Too Far?

There's really no such thing as "cancel culture." It exists in a small segment of social media (mostly Twitter as far as I can tell) discourse and that's really it. No one's life is being destroyed just for *****y opinions. JK Rowling is a horrible bigot who has millions of people listening to her; she's still sitting comfortably on her Mt. Everest of cash with her crocodile tears about how oppressed she is.

 

No.

 

I wish we could cancel some JC accounts.

 

What does "cancel culture" mean? Is it a synonym of "online shaming" ?

 

An A+ video I can't recall if includes cursing so I'll put it under a tag in case.

Spoiler

 

I'm e-mailing Noam Chomsky about this!

 

I’ve got a few in mind.

 

No. People can have thier ****** opinions and also people can want them shamed for it. It goes both ways

 

Cancel culture is simply a new way of referring to a boycott. In the past, boycotts rarely had any impact, especially because communicating one’s message was was so much harder, but now we have the internet, with Twitter and other social networks. People have come together to make boycotts much more frequent and much more powerful.

I’m more concerned about the ubiquity of smart phones and the strategy of using them to record people that their owners find disagreeable. All too often, you find out that these videos, which seem so damning at first, actually have a damnable lack of context, along with disproportionate and severe retribution. It’s highly different from some author stating their dumb opinions on Twitter for all to see and condemn.

 

I just think this sounds all too familiar. Back in the 1980s, I remember the uproar over how some people felt that the culture had been debased in recent years. They pointed to things like tawdry content on TV (especially the Fox network), explicit lyrics in music (particularly rap music), and heavy violence in movies. They demanded action, like getting sponsorships revoked and shows cancelled, as well as government action, like mandated warning labels and the like. Opponents of these ideas believed that they stifled creativity and infringed on free speech. Their attitude boiled down to, "Unrestricted ideas are good. If you don't like it, don't watch or don't buy it."
And history repeats itself, with a few variations. Nothing new under the sun.

 

Eh, I think it often goes too far. It went too far when Fatty Arbuckle was sacrificed to get people angry at Hollywood to shut up for a bit, it went too far when Hollywood blacklisted people for being communists, it went too far when Sinead O'Connor's criticisms of abuse in the Catholic Church tanked her U.S. career, and it went too far when the Dixie Chicks were torn apart for one thing they said in an interview that was 'too political'. I don't see anything new, I just see new people doing it.

It'd be handy to start off with what this particular letter says, though.

 

It's a conservative buzz phrase that unfortunately has entered the common parlance.

Certainly when conservative groups were demanding the end of 'offensive' TV shows, heavy metal music, or roleplaying games, they didn't seem to be horrified by trying to 'cancel' these things.

 

I personally don't see anything wrong with the letter.

 

I think my issue here is that I'm just not seeing the letter make a good link between people getting upset on Twitter and a journalist getting fired or a researcher not getting tenure. We don't always know the internal workings within a company or organization. We don't know if the latest negative publicity of someone due to cancel culture was the proverbial last straw and we're only privy to that and not prior wrongdoings that they may have only been warned for. For example, that feminist whose contract was not renewed and JKR and all said it was punishment for her holding terf views, she had actually already been in trouble for harassment of transpeople online. But Terfs framed it as "punishment for holding feminist views." So really I'm gonna need that letter to do a better job of actually linking cancel culture to said firings.

 

The letter does sound like it's quite reasonable in that it says, firstly, that this is a standard thing expected from the right (as they have a track record on that), and that bad ideas are eliminated by exposure and argument. It particularly reminds me of a number of people I know that are very silent when it comes to issues of how to improve diversity in science not because they disagree with the premise (and by that, I don't just mean that diversity is good or everyone is welcome, but that they do believe that steps should be taken that can help that) because they disagree about the best approach to get those sorts of results.

I do think one significant thing is that they didn't frame this as "cancel culture", they just framed this as being about the value of open debate, which I think is a lot more generalized, and a lot more about defending some general principles. I don't think the letter is served well by trying to put it in the context of "cancel culture". This isn't strictly about how Twitter handles things, this is about how organizations and institutions handle things. A university professor can be criticised, for example, but the university can uphold the principles they stand by without Twitter having to approve. Overall, this doesn't strike me about being about "cancel culture" in the social media definition, it's much more institutional.

 

I think there is a time and place for cancel culture. When it comes to people bad takes on twitter it’s easy. You have the proof. When it comes to stuff like actual crimes I would like a lot of evidence before we go and start boycotting that person. Take Johnny Depp for example. Or take Justin Bieber more recently. Both were “cancelled” or at least tried to be when they were innocent. I just don’t want to cancel people over baseless stuff without evidence.

 

I'm mostly just thankful that I didn't have to cancel my subscription to Harper's, since I didn't have one in the first place.

If you replace "cancel culture" with "accountability," the reasons for the outrage become clear.

Also, re: Margaret Atwood-- back in 2016, she signed onto an open letter at the University of Vancouver in support of a professor there who had been accused of sexual misconduct (a friend of mine was a student of her's some years before, which is how I learned about it). As always, your favorite is problematic.

 

Other people have summed up what I think.

Everyone’s free to choose what they consume.


No shame in refusing to consume media based on it’s creator, but also no shame in separating the two either.

As for open debate in this context (good faith disagreement) it depends on where each individual draws the line about what it is acceptable to disagree about. (where authors like Rowling are facing controversy).

When I’ve partaken in debates in this very forum among other places on and offline, I’ve noticed debates about whether certain views are less acceptable by nature due to the way they affect people. Therefore, certain debates may be less valid than others because of the subject matter. It gets tricky because where people draw the line seems very case-by-case from what I can tell.


About Rowling, I honestly don’t know what to think, regardless of whether I like her written content. It’s just not clear to me. However, I understand why someone would consider certain points less debatable than others where social issues are concerned.

 

Yes, there is. Speaking as an artist and as someone who has consumed a variety of artwork over the past ten years as a viewer, the two cannot and should not be separated.

Short of a massive and public change of heart, she's done.

 

This pretty much sums it up for me:

 

Rowling in particular has complete control over her intellectual property and continues to profit handsomely from it.