White Hot Harlots knocks it out of the park once again:
https://whitehotharlots.tumblr.com/post ... el-cultureQuote:
The existence of cancel culture has gone through more cycles of confirmation and denial than that of the yeti. First it existed and it was great, then it did not exist, then it did kinda exist but you should call it “consequence culture” instead, and then it existed but actually it was when someone unjustly robbed internet weirdos of their ability to cancel others (is any man truly free from censorship, if he himself is not allowed to censor?).
Most recently it’s become impossible to deny the existence of something that could reasonably be called cancel culture–especially when those previously inclined toward denial must now defend their god-given right ruin the lives of people who are mean to them on the internet. So the tack has shifted. Instead of saying it doesn’t exist, they complain that it’s not been properly demarcated, that the dozens of instances of people having their lives destroyed for reasons no sane person would support are in fact just strawmen, that really all we’re seeing right now is the powerless rising up and somehow exercising power (which I guess they have in spite of being powerless?) in order to punish some of society’s biggest monsters.
So let’s try and define this, shall we?
Cancel culture is an approach to social justice that eschews attempts toward systemic reform and focuses instead on selectively punishing individuals for semantic transgressions, many of which are trivial or even non-existent. Cancelation involves distributing copies of a person’s statement(s) (screenshots, audio, video, transcripts), posting them widely, and demanding that people in positions of authority over that person punish that person. There is no adequate response to cancelation: all statements and clarification are considered proof of guilt. There is no amount of context or evidence that a canceled person can summon that will appease the cancelers. The goal of cancelation is to remove a person from society for the rest of their lives: leaving them unemployable, unpublishable, uneducateable, and unloved.
Cancel culture can be understood as the enforcement mechanism of privilege theory. Privilege theory is a fundamentally conservative understanding of social relations based on four key beliefs: 1) Human life has no inherent value, 2) Society contains only a finite amount of decency, which should not be allocated to the undeserving, 3) All human interaction is transactional, and 4) People’s identity markers are fully deterministic of their abilities, beliefs, and experiences. Cancel culture is, in short, what “resistance” looks like when the resistors have completely internalized the worldview of those they claim to oppose.
Privilege theory has become popular within mainstream liberalism as the Democratic party and other liberal institutions have become more and more economically conservative and more openly dedicated to imperialism abroad and violent repression at home. Since the Democrats share the same general goals as the Republican, they’ve needed to more forcefully project semantic and aesthetic differences from the avowedly conservative party. The obtuseness and cruelty of privilege theory only become palatable after particular forms of training and indoctrination, which creates a strong sense of in-group identification among those who embrace privilege theory (and a concurrent hatred of those in the out-group); this allows liberals to believe themselves to be diametrically opposed to conservatives, even as the politicians they support and brands they consume share 98% of the goals and beliefs of their conservative counterparts.
A bonus to privilege theory, from the standpoint of a party that embraces austerity, is that it casts what was recently understood as human decency instead as privilege, something unearned and undeserved that can and should be taken away at will. Without this belief privilege theory has no political utility. And without the ability to enforce this belief, privilege theory becomes simply a creepy means of understanding the world that few decent people would even pretend to believe in.
Enter cancel culture: a means of policing speech and beliefs that is by design both arbitrary and petty and by nature guaranteed to disproportionately harm those whose beliefs threaten the status quo. The (relatively) innocent people who find themselves unemployable aren’t casualties of a just social upheaval. The fact that people are afraid to step out of line even slightly or express any remotely unpopular opinion is the entire point of cancel culture. It’s the only reason this shit has thrived beyond the most neurotic corners of academe and social media–people are simply not allowed to point out how batshit, hateful, and regressive it is.
To suffer cancellation, a person need not do or say something that most people would recognize as offensive or hurtful. Cancel culture allows accusations to flow from free association: a person who is afraid of having their home burned during a riot can be accused of not respecting the humanity of black people; a person who posts data questioning the political efficacy of riots can be accused of “anti-blackness;” someone who does not put their pronouns in their social media bio can be accused of denying the existence of trans people, etc, etc.
There have been some instances where people have been cancelled for genuinely offensive and/or hateful actions. Most often, however, truly odious people are immune–the presidential election, after all, has come down to a pair of senile racists who have been plausibly accused of rape. In reality, consequential cancellations arrive after disagreements, or because the canceler simply does not like the cancelee. One can find themselves canceled for expressing a heterodox opinion about a book or movie that has been deemed socially important, speaking about social justice issues either too often or too infrequently, evincing any criticism or skepticism toward any belief held by a person who can make a plausible claim to identity-based victimhood, or, most damningly, pointing out that this particular approach to social justice has been an abject failure. And that’s the point. The point is to embrace conservatism. The point is to spread hatred and misery.
_________________
Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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