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The term "cancel culture" conflates many different and distinct social phenomena in a way that stifles the discussion and understanding of any of them individually. Some of the "cancel culture" phenomena are good. Some of them are bad. Some of them don't exist. As an example, here's a list off the top of my head of "cancellings" that have happened or are purported to have happened:
- Actors losing jobs after being outed as sex criminals
- Kaepernick losing his job for kneeling in protest of the police state
- That star wars actress losing her job for harassing her co-stars and comparing being a right winger to the holocaust
- Working class people losing their jobs for expressing a point of view that their employer doesn't want to be associated with
- Working class people losing their facebook accounts for posting reactionary garbage
- People getting mad about something on the internet in a way that doesn't threaten to change anything
- People getting mad about something on the internet in a way that does threaten to destroy livelihoods
- People harassing individuals on twitter for making a Bad Post
- Hasbro rebranding their Mr Potato Head line as just Potato Head
- The Seuss Estate choosing not to publish some of their least popular books because they have racist caricatures
These don't really have a lot in common, so I don't think that using the phrase actually clarifies or helps communicate meaning. This is also why, in my opinion, you get a ton of "Cancel Culture is [good/bad/real/fake/actually just capitalism/etc.] takes in online leftist spaces, because we are each talking about our own Cancel Culture Rorschach.
Personally, I think that a lot of cancel culture discourse is a top-down right wing media project to condition their audience into equating stupid culture war bullshit with the fear that the woke mob is going to take their job.
There's also the whole ur-cancel culture of people wanting to "cancel" the Beatles and burning their albums back in the 60s; or evangelicals wanting to "cancel" Disney in the 90s because Scar seems a little gay to them and because Disney gave same-sex partner benefits to gay and lesbian employees back then.
That's a good point. There's a million things to criticize the term for, and one of them is that it sneakily implies a bunch of nonsense ideas like "this is a new thing that hasn't been a part of American society until recently." It's also almost only ever used for things conservatives get mad at. Ask them about Kaepernick or that AP journalist and you'll get an excuse for why those are different. The yearly outrage about starbucks cups isn't cancelling, but the imagined outrage about Aunt Jemima or Mr Potato Head is.
All-in-all, I don't think the term is productive and I personally dont use it
Cancel culture isn't real, it's just people facing consequences for their actions.
"Dogpile culture" is a more appropriate term for the very real tendency on Twitter (and Tumblr before it) to amplify any perceived misdeed through a game of digital telephone until you can no longer tell whether someone is truly problematic or not and all you can do is pick a side and go with the crowd.
But the modern term "cancel culture" has been so bastardized, appropriated by right-wing trolls, and conflated with basic accountability that it doesn't mean anything anymore, and it's completely pointless to talk about "cancel culture."
"cancel culture", just like "SJWs" or "idpol" or whatever the outrage-of-the-month is, has been around for centuries.
it only acquires a name when it's directed towards the benefit of non-white (or other types) of minorities.
Similar to how someone who likes Japanese/Korean culture is called a weaboo/koreaboo, while someone who guzzles down American/British culture is just "normal"
Was with you until the last line. Everyone (at least in the United States) who's obsessed with a culture they aren't native to, to the point of making it a key feature of their identity, is looked at as a weirdo. If some 15-year-old kid from Milwaukee has a Union Jack plastered on everything they own, talks non-stop about Dr. Who, and makes shitty food because they think British "cuisine" is fit for human consumption, no one is looking at that kid as "normal." It's probably rooted in some feeling along the lines of "oh, you can't fit in to your own culture/reject your own culture, so you're trying to be someone you're not, fuck you."
It's a tricky thing to put your finger on. I think "native" is a bit essentializing -- no one is native to anywhere in the deep time of the earth. Concepts rooted in historical materialism like social situation/habitus really get to the root of it, and even common sense terms like "heritage" or "indigenous" are a bit better. It's like the difference between Eminem and Chet Haze. Rap and black culture isn't "native" to Eminem, but it's the habitus that he grew up within living in Detroit. He has an intimate relationship to it. Chet Haze is at best a goofy punchline because his rap persona/rap culture is not connected at all to his lived experience.
There is also definitely a social component to this. Appropriating from black culture is and has always been cool in American culture -- the concept of cool itself has diasporic origins in western Africa and was appropriated through jazz. But appropriating from Asian culture has generally been done by intellectuals, new-agey types, eccentrics and so on. It's been seen as an effete affectation for about a hundred years now, while black appropriation is supposedly masculine, virile, primal, and so on. And what is the one exception? Martial arts, when you are literally punching and kicking someone in the face.
Cancel culture is a ploy to whip up people's anger amd distract from real issues, and having any strong opinion about it makes you a rube cmv
Harping on it also makes it seem like "cancel culture" leads to really horrible consequences when in reality it usually just means people are saying things about the person they don't like or they get their Twitter accounts shut down, that's usually about it.
i think its generally good. the problem is that the people who complain about cancel culture the most still engage in it: ben shapiro hates cancel culture but him and his goons got that one journalist fired from AP because she was in a pro-palestine group in college.
It’s social capital competition and as such doesn’t bear any relation to reality on societal scale, cmv
But it’s not how it works though, you can’t cancel raytheon or nfl or israel on twitter, so it’s largely influencers game. for sure, it could probably cancel someone horrible, but, crucially, smol (without alternative source of social capital/capital). Shapiro still happily rakes millions.
Well, yeah. But it’s not good or bad, it simply is. Kinda emergent property of twitter-verse groups, kinda like ostracism in the city-states.
