Read on Twitter
Certainly can't speak for anyone else, but interacting with Woke Twitter™ over the last decade has I hope improved my awareness of and willingness to throw down for people who are not exactly like myself. That seems like a good idea. Those seem like good people.
Whereas engaging in an exchange of ideas with Janice Turner and her ilk has only led to nuisance lawsuit threats from them, and people calling me a human toilet in a national publication.
Who are the people? What are their ideas? Let's see. Toby Young. Milo Yiannopoulos. Graham Linehan. Julies Bindel and Burchill. These are not, objectively, good people with good ideas.
And let's just say, like with Milo & Graham, they disappeared off Twitter tomorrow. They stopped getting columns in the Times. Does that mean we will no longer be exposed to these ideas? No, because their ideas are common and embedded in most culture.
We can therefore conclude, fear of cancellation is not the fear of missing out on something good because the ideas are not good. Nor is it the fear of these ideas disappearing altogether, because they will not. It is simply that specific people fear for their revenue streams.
However, given the evidence— and by evidence I mean number of published columns, books, invites on to television and radio, and so on – it is fair to say that even fear of losing income is not reasonable.
A large number of people, in fact, find their media careers renewed by invoking the spectre of wokeness. It is a money spinner, plain and simple. They enjoy the attention but more to the point they enjoy the relevance.
Resistance against wokeness is a tired idea for people who have no ideas. It imparts a sheen of intellectualism to people whose content would otherwise be restricted to whinging about who is doing the washing up in their household.
They have correctly identified that people who are victims deserve justice, and then incorrectly identified themselves as victims.
The idea that one can perceive oneself as a victim if any attention whatsoever is given on social media to lives less privileged than one's own, or ideas that are better than one's own, well that becomes where they're telling on themselves.
Which leads us back to the issue of why, particularly in Britain, there are so many columns of this type. And the answer is because bog average middle-class white people with unimpressive ideas are accustomed to having 100% of the media bandwidth.
Which is not to say the same doesn't happen in America. But speaking as someone who moved to the UK as an adult, it is really astounding when you find out all of the deep familial connections between media, money, and politics.
The idea-having class is a group of people who were told as they toddled their first steps that pontificating in the broads was their appointed role in the universe. Other people getting a piece of that does not make them happy.
Although their ideas are commonplace and their intellect is average, they have been assured from childhood that nobody else is as cultured as they are, nobody else has read books, nobody else has ideas. And so they are unable to accept them.
The only thing they know how to do, is what they learned they should do. Which is to take up column inches and crowd any other ideas out. So that is what they're doing and why they're doing it.
While the model of mass media communications, bottlenecked by carriers, gatekeepers, and tastemakers still holds, the fact is social media does not have column inches. They cannot stop good ideas.
So the columnists now now have a secondary task, which is convincing their friends and relatives in politics that they are the ones speaking for the voiceless.
That there exists some third party, which is not the widespread bigoted opinions held by many in power, nor is it the better and more diverse opinions by those derided as well, but some unnamed and presumably extremely large class of people we never hear from otherwise.
Though that contains so little logic it sucks logic out of a room, it is proving reasonably successful, because they are talking to people just like themselves. People who whether they identify as left or right have seen that the future may not include quite so many of them.
Anyway, it's time for breakfast where I am. Please let me know if you happen to stumble across any good ideas from these people that have apparently been silenced.
