Thread: Since I started talking about why I think left critiques of cancel culture are important I've gotten several requests for an exact definition. I always give it but most people don't see it because it's buried in a reply to a reply to the original tweet! So here it is:

"Cancel culture" refers to an interrelated cluster of trends toward mutual surveillance and hair trigger denunciation and public shaming that has different levels of impact in different political (and other) subcultures and in the larger culture.

"OK," some people naturally ask, "but is this new? Haven't there always been nonsense denunciations, etc.?"

Sure, but (a) not being new doesn't mean something shouldn't be critiqued and (b) right now some of this stuff is fed by a few different factors, some new, some not:

A lot of *online* cancel culture (and sadly this stuff is far from an exclusively online phenomenon, although Online is its toxic heart) is a result of the feedback loops built into contemporary social media.

That gets particularly dangerous when it intersects with the collapse of legacy media, the rise of the gig economy, and the semi-feudal power of employers in largely non-unionized American workplaces.

Everything I've said so far is about the larger culture but, even though cancel culture is hardly confined to the left--centrist liberals are often its most enthusiastic practitioners, and re: the right see Lindsey Stone. But I'm particularly concerned with left CC for 2 reasons.

First, I don't care if the right eats itself. In fact, I'm pretty happy if the right eats itself. I want the left to win!

Secondly, all the broader cultural trends I've talked about so far lead to a particularly toxic subculture on the left when they intersect with a left-specific problem, which is this:

The left was far from the levers of real world power for a long long time. Think about the 90s and TINA (There Is No Alternative). This is finally, thank the Gods of historical materialism, starting to change, but we still have a lot of bad habits left over from that long exile.

Basically, lacking any prospects for real world power, we started to think of politics as a performance of individual moral commitment. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see how that mindset, combined with the broader cultural trends just mentioned, becomes very bad.

So: What's to be done? I'll talk about this more in the presentation I'm doing on Monday at 6 for @jacobinmag's Stay at Home series on YouTube, but basically I want the left to do two things.

The first is that we need to make a conscientious effort to clean house in terms of our internal political subculture because the main problem with that subculture being like this is that it makes most ordinary working-class people want to run screaming in the opposite direction.

The second is that instead of gaslighting people by pretending the phenomenon doesn't exist we need to offer left solutions to some the worst effects of the broader culture trend--most obviously rebuilding the labor movement and ending at-will employment.

Sorry, I'm not sure I'm following the analogy. Could you say more?