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I would like to think through some ideas about a thing called “cancel culture.”
Its critics often compare it to censorship and fascism, while describing its actors as a reactionary mob. Cancel culture is imperfect, but I have feelings about this particular critique.
Its critics often compare it to censorship and fascism, while describing its actors as a reactionary mob. Cancel culture is imperfect, but I have feelings about this particular critique.
Censorship is a system of silencing undertaken at the hands of the state. Fascism is a condition of a state under dictatorial control. Both are functions of an authoritarian state.
At its core, cancel culture, in contrast, is a grassroots corrective action that functions to enact consequences for harmful offenses that the state cannot or will not punish: Harassment. Intimidation. Racism. Bigotry. Sexual assault.
Cancel culture’s consequence is the erosion of the cancelled subject’s cultural capital, and thereby their literal capital.
Cancel culture tends to hit at the wallet: When it is no longer profitable to provide a platform for the cancelled subject, their value in the cultural marketplace diminishes, and so does their ability to do harm while protected by those who would stand to profit off of them.
Are there better paths toward corrective action? Perhaps. And cancel culture certainly has its pitfalls. It is punitive rather than restorative. It can leave little room for mistakes, revision, growth.
But I believe a critique of cancel culture that elides it with the actions of an authoritarian state is irresponsible. Because the action of cancel culture is not one of state intimidation, but of protest undertaken by the people. Most often, people at the margins of power.
And to call these protests the actions of a mob feels dismissive of the reality that individual human people are genuinely angered by the harmful the actions of another, and make their anger known. That anger is often met with calls for nuance. But what is nuanced about harm?
Ultimately, cancel culture moves against the entrenched indifference the dominant culture holds for those who exist on its margins by raising a ruckus that is impossible to ignore. Is it nuanced? No. But nuance is not the project of protest. Change is.
