“Cancel culture” and criticism

I keep bouncing off of my attempts to say something sophisticated about the challenges in constructively criticizing social justice advocacy culture. It’s a huge subject and I get lost in nuance.

One must start from the recognition that 95% of criticism of social justice advocacy culture is disingenuous reactionary bullshit from opponents of social justice … and that 95% is not 100%. There are legitimate criticisms which are not simply attacks on the project of social justice itself. There are roadblocks deterring worthy criticisms which emerge organically from social justice advocacy culture itself, but I try to keep from focusing on my grumbles because most of the frictions preventing the culture from facing its own failings have their roots in necessary adaptations to dealing with opponents of social justice.

Today I fell into a rant about “cancel culture” on Bluesky, so it seemed worth capturing (and slightly refining) that here.

What are we even talking about?

The Thing We Are Talking About When We Talk About Cancel Culture reflects this knotty challenge. Because opponents of social justice often make absurd claims about “cancel culture” or “call-out culture”, advocates for social justice often claim there is no such thing. But there is a thing, it is a feature of social justice advocacy culture, and as the Bluesky thread which inspired this post observes …

in hindsight it makes sense to see cancel culture as a harbinger of the end of shame rather than an excess of it. “shame” presupposes stable social norms and a sense of what one did wrong and how it could have been avoided. not suddenly a thunderbolt from zeus thrown at random people

I have captured that thread below. This post started from me expanding on the point: the scary thing is capriciousness and lack of proportion. Memorable real examples include:

• A woman followed by a handful of friends on Twitter ironically takes the voice of a bigot to make a bad joke about AIDS in Africa, gets on a plane, and when she gets off she is infamous and unemployed. She deserved criticism, sure, but that was capricious and disproportionate.
• A couple of guys at a tech conference joke to each other about the funny technical term “dongle” and by the end of the day they are infamous and one of them is unemployed. They deserved criticism, maybe, but that was capricious and disproportionate.
• A trans woman writes a raw, personal story attempting to subvert a transphobic trope, the publisher faces so much criticism of it being “obviously” transphobic that they withdraw it, and the writer ends up so shaken by the pushback from her own community that she never attempts to get anything published again. A tragedy.

We all have said bad things that landed with people as even worse than they were, then found ourselves unable to set things right despite our sincere efforts. Dreading the possibility — however distant — that such an episode could seriously damage our careers or standing in community is natural and justified.

Moves people in social justice advocacy culture make to dismiss these concerns — like saying “‘cancel culture’ just means ‘consequences’” or “people should be more careful what they say” — implicitly endorse the capriciousness and disproportionate stakes.

The Thing We Are Talking About When We Talk About “Cancel Culture” is turbo-charged by online social media shitstorm dynamics but it is such a distinct phenomenon in social justice advocacy culture that Jo Freeman referred to it as “trashing” in a famous essay about feminist organizing in 1976.

The acid test, however, comes when one tries to defend a person under attack, especially when she’s not there, If such a defense is taken seriously, and some concern expressed for hearing all sides and gathering all evidence, trashing is probably not occurring. But if your defense is dismissed with an oft-hand “How can you defend her?”; if you become tainted with suspicion by attempting such a defense; if she is in fact indefensible, you should take a closer look at those making the accusations. There is more going on than simple disagreement.

Perversely, the more one actually cares about social justice, the more vulnerable one becomes to the thing we are talking about when we are talking about “cancel culture”. That bad actors often benefit from being “cancelled” is no comfort if one is neither cynical nor evil.

Again, most criticisms of “cancel culture” are disingenuous BS from bad actors trying to rationalize their desire to say bad things in public without consequence. But they are leveraging a real thing which presents substantive problems. Dismissing that real thing and those problems helps the bad actors and weakens the effectiveness of our advocacy.

That social justice advocates all too often snap — either retreating from public advocacy or even joining the opposition — is bad for everyone. I submit that many people we push out from social justice advocacy culture were just flawed in an ordinary, human way, just trying to figure things out, just making honest mistakes. On principle, social justice advocacy culture should help people where they stumble, not attack them. Yet the Driving People Out thing in social justice advocacy is another pattern which pre-dates the era of the identity politics framework and social media. Yes, some of those folks were charlatans all along, but is rooting out charlatans as vigorously as possible worth the cost? The right don’t think so; they support their charlatans and it sure pays off for their cause.

Many of us are too eager to read dissenters as having been Charlatans All Along; the psychological pressures of people facing a shitstorm of criticism will screw up even the most level-headed person. F’rinstance, I am fascinated by the tragedy of Warren Farrell. In the 1960s & ’70s he was a deeply committed feminist advocate. He turned the feminist analytical toolkit on what we now call toxic masculinity; I read his 1993 book The Myth Of Male Power, which has a fascinating mix of insight and bad ideas. Had feminist culture engaged with what he wanted to address rather than rejected him, our understanding of toxic masculinity would have gotten decades of head start. Instead, the pushback he got from feminist women drove him mad, and eventually he became a thoroughly evil MRA.

As I say in a longer word on grappling with criticisms of advocacy culture …

Preventing social justice loyalists from making good faith critiques of advocacy culture is not just bad on the liberal-values merits, it has been bad for achieving social justice. We can and should do better.

Commentaries

Aelkus on Bluesky

Not exactly my read, but illuminating, and it inspired the thread which became this post.

in hindsight it makes sense to see cancel culture as a harbinger of the end of shame rather than an excess of it. “shame” presupposes stable social norms and a sense of what one did wrong and how it could have been avoided. not suddenly a thunderbolt from zeus thrown at random people

because that was what CC was for the vast majority of people actually impacted by it.

at its peak, it really was essentially a free for all driven by platform dynamics and a ritualized system of aggression

Venkatesh Rao described a good part of here: The Internet of Beefs

there's a saying “not even wrong” to describe bad theories — they’re so bad that they’re impossible to be shown wrong. you might coin an analogue: “not even a mob with pitchforks.” all of the insanity of a crowd stoning someone to death, but none of the lasting social effects

i don’t think it makes sense to make an analytical separation, anyway, between “online harassment” and “cancel culture” as phenomena. they were both symptoms of the same underlying generating mechanisms in the 2010s

we do so largely because they are still ideologically loaded terms rather than neutral ways of describing “large masses of people concentrating negative energy on the internet towards a single target”

similarly, little of the discussions of “surveillance capitalism” in the 2010s acknowledged that social media was always built around peer to peer surveillance

the end result was fairly predictable. lots of random furries in discords got their social identities obliterated by other random furries in discords. however those with significant offline social status not only weathered the storm but became proficient at controlling platforms to use as tools of aggression. the quasi-feudal system Rao described in the post I linked died, and was replaced by what X represents today. A fully operational battle station controlled by a single nutty person

the fact that the system that produced this progression is now filled with nostalgia speaks to the enduring delusions its participants have about its true nature

Frances Lee | Excommunicate Me From The Church Of Social Justice

This memoir of familiar frustrations with social justice advocacy culture has a telling comment about the topic of this post:

Scrolling through my news feed sometimes feels Iike sliding into a pew to be blasted by a fragmented, frenzied sermon. I know that much of the media posted there means to discipline me to be a better activist and community member. But when dictates aren’t followed, a common procedure of punishment ensues. Punishments for saying / doing /b elieving the wrong thing include shaming, scolding, calling out, isolating, or eviscerating someone’s social standing. Discipline and punishment has been used for all of history to control and destroy people. Why is it being used in movements meant to liberate all of us?

Offbeat Empire | Liberal bullying: Privilege-checking and semantics-scolding as internet sport

Common call-out culture trends:

• Focus on very public complaints. I can think of exactly one time when someone emailed their concern about problematic language. These complaints seem to be always intended for an audience.
• Lack of interest in a dialogue. These complaints aren’t questions or invitations to discuss the issue. They’re harshly-worded accusations and scoldings (which I’ve written about before).
• Lack of consideration for the context or intent. The focus is on this isolated incident (this one post, this one word, this one time), with de-emphasis on the author’s background, experience, or the context of the website on which the post appears.
• And on a more stylistic note, these complaints are often prefaced with phrases like “Um,” and other condescending affectations.

It’s challenging for me because the values motivating these complaints are completely in-line with both my personal politics as well as my professional passion for catering to niche markets and semi-marginalized cultures …

Lydia Laurenson | Cancelled Left and Right

A memoir with Laurenson’s characteristically thoughtful ambivalences. A taste:

What bothered me most was that there seemed to be no grace, no possibility for a canceled person to recover or make amends — not even anything resembling a “fair hearing” that a person could request once targeted by the cancel mob. Additionally, the cancellation process seemed unfairly harsh for any but very serious crimes. In other words, cancellation struck me as a punishment that didn’t fit most crimes it was used for. Moreover, even when applied to bad cases, the process seemed counterproductive for the community using it; most people who’d been canceled shifted away from social justice norms or left the movement entirely, and sometimes took their friends with them. All these effects seemed destructive and wrong, but saying anything publicly was clearly dangerous for one’s reputation and sanity.

[⋯]

Worse, the club benefited from cancellation. It helped them stay at the top. That was the thing that disgusted me so much that ultimately I could not bring myself to publicly rejoin the movement. “The club” let newcomers run into the cancellation buzzsaw while watching to see if they survived, and if the newbies didn’t? Well, then there was less competition for the women in that room! Supporting a canceled feminist was a calculation made afterwards, based on whether she made it through the experience.

Everyday Feminism | Maisha Z. Johnson | 6 Signs Your Call-Out Isn’t Actually About Accountability

An insider’s review of types of misfires.

In many ways, holding each other accountable has come to mean punishing each other. Sometimes it feels like we’re all competing on a hardcore game show, trying to knock each other down to be crowned the movement’s Best Activist.

[⋯]

1. You’re Not Focused on the Outcome
2. You’re Not Choosing Your Battles Based on What’s Best for the Community Involved
3. You’re Using the Same Strategy for Every Situation
4. You’re Centering Yourself on Behalf of Another Group
5. You’re Engaging in Respectability Politics to Police Other People’s Behavior
6. You’re Trying to Force Someone to Be Accountable

Adrienne Maree Brown | Unthinkable Thoughts: Call-out Culture in the Age of Covid-19

Too subtle and poetically rich to usefully quote; this taste is meant as an enticement to read it.

the kind of callouts we are currently engaging in do not necessarily think about movements’ needs as a whole. movements need to grow and deepen, we need to ‘transform ourselves to transform the world’, to ‘be transformed in the service of the work’. movements need to become the practice ground for what we are healing towards, co-creating. movements are responsible for embodying what we are inviting our people into. we need the people within our movements, all socialized into and by unjust systems, to be on liberation paths. not already free, but practicing freedom every day. not already beyond harm, but accountable for doing our individual and internal work to end harm, which includes actively working to gain awareness of the ways we can and have harmed each other, and ending those cycles in ourselves and our communities.

Contrapoints | Canceling

A long video-essay. I should note that, as usual, Natalie Wynn inspires a lot of criticisms, and I have my own … and as usual I admire her brave, deeply-considered, astringent efforts to face hard questions. There’s a transcript if one needs it.