seeing ezra miller in a movie and thinking about, woof, "cancel culture."

meandering thread

is it real? I mean some of the meanings of the word are real sometimes.

it looks like Whedon won't work for a bit. The other man implicated, Johns, will.

Miller has a job. Fisher does not.

Dawson has a job. Carrano does not.

Sometimes ordinary people go viral (or go viral within a certain community) and lose their jobs. Not just for bigotry-- I've known progressives that have lost their jobs at conservative institutions via the same mechanisms.

But is that even the same thing?

Is campaigning to get a professor fired from a conservative college because he assigned a Heretical Book the same thing as a megacorp telling a multi-millionaire that he won't be making movies for a bit b/c his brand is tainted?

does "cancelling" even have any effect when even in the same incident one dude walks away just fine and the other faces minor consequences? And then the people who called out the abusers in that situation face greater consequences?

The media focused on Carrano's tweets & not Dawson's alleged assault even when the latter went to trial. The media focused on Whedon, not Johns, & the media briefly covered the Miller story but doesn't seem to think it's relevant when covering Fisher being dropped from The Flash.

a funny viral joke that i see now and again is "if it's not from the cancél region of france, it's just sparkling consequences." But is that true? By which I mean, does a cancellation ever have much to do with consequences?

Carrano was "cancelled" many times before being dropped

So was Whedon.

And as a result of Whedon's cancellation, who else has to face consequences? Ray Fisher.

"Cancellation" isn't the metric being used here by Disney or AT&T. It's how much a person's brand is associated with their company being bad in media coverage of the company's decisions-- which is to *a degree* correlated with "cancellation," but not entirely correlated.

From their perspective, Whedon and Fisher made the company look bad, and unless part of the equation changes, continued employment will remind people of the company being bad. Johns isn't a big enough name (and the media elected not to make him a big enough name) to matter.

the media elected not to continue highlighting Miller's behavior. So they don't matter.

There's nothing new here. This isn't something new to the social media age-- it's how media companies have always operated.

We routinely "cancel" Chrissy Teigen, but what that normally means is making jokes about her cringey tweets. From the perspective of the Extremely Online Blue Checkmark Who Gets Cancelled, "cancelled" can mean "dunked on," "ratioed," "called out," and "harassed" at once.

From the POV of Dog Shampoo Guy, he was "cancelled" when people made fun of him for showering with dog shampoo.

He publishes in the Wacky Online Phrenology Mag.

"Cancel Culture isn't real," "Cancel Culture is Good Actually," "Cancel Culture is just consequences," none of these things are useful because the phrase means so many different things, and different things to different people,

and no matter the meaning, we almost always misunderstand the actual power dynamics in play.

We don't usually have power here.

A marvel artist was cancelled for including antisemitic imagery in a comic.

The last time this happened? The artist was fired. Did not work with marvel again.

This time? Seems like he's going to fine. The difference was in the mainstream media coverage.

The newest artist, well, he's got a history of fashy and bigoted bullshit-- but the Guardian didn't focus on that. A lot of comics outlets didn't mention it either.

I think a huge difference between the two stories was simply a question of nationality. The older story involved bigotry in Indonesia, and the new story involved bigotry and fascism in Brazil, and the former was much easier for Americans to understand than the latter.

Journalists didn't need to put a lot effort into explaining the former. Journalists would have needed to do a bit more work with the latter, and didn't bother for what they found to be a relatively small story. Brief, soft coverage, then let it go.

The Brand is what matters. And cancellation does not taint The Brand. Cancellation doesn't go beyond social media websites (which always represent only a slice of the consumer base). The Brand is in danger when the media covers it negatively.

(True on the small scale too-- progressives get fired from conservative campuses when niche right-wing outlets decide to make a thing of it)

And then everyone involved, not just abusers, not just bigots, but everyone whose name is highlighted in the story is in danger.

Anyway fuck me why am I ranting to twitter about this when I could be making more coffee