I always found myself in an uncomfortable place in the cancel culture debate. I think fights over the boundaries of acceptable speech aren’t just legitimate, but they’re actually needed and overdue, and I think the way they play out online leads to excesses, disproportionate punishments, oftentimes the wrong people being targeted for the wrong things, and then, over time, a crappy speech environment and a lot of political backlash for everyone.
So here I want to get beyond the cancel culture is it real or fake, is it good or bad debate. There’s something real that people are referring to when they talk about cancel culture, and it’s both good and bad. There are good parts, and there are bad parts. And so the deeper question is, what do we actually want to achieve here, and how do we go about achieving it? For me, and I’m the only person I can answer for, it’s a world in which we speak about each other more respectfully, in which we listen to each other more openly, and that becomes a foundation, and this part is important. (...)
Natalie Wynn is my favorite YouTuber where she makes these remarkable videos. It combines social theory and politics under the moniker ContraPoints. You’ll hear us reference a video she made on cancellation and J.K. Rowling in here, and I really do recommend looking them up. Both of them have had experience on both sides of this issue, and they’ve come out of it on the other end with, in my view, unusually complex, nuanced views of how this plays out and what it all means. So this is a great conversation, one I wanted to have for a long time, and I’m glad we did.
I want to start a bit in the experiences both of you have had with the thing that gets called cancel culture. And Will, I’ll with you. Describe what being cancelled was like for you, not necessarily exactly what happened, but how did it feel.
WILL WILKINSON: It was a shock. There was an immediacy to what happened. I had tweeted. The tweet created controversy. I tweeted my bad tweet a minute before I went to bed. And then first thing in the morning, I wake up too just like a world of shit. I’m just getting piled on by all sorts of opportunistic right-wingers who were taking my very funny joke out of context and claiming that I was really calling for the hanging the vice president of the United States, just the most ridiculous bad faith, but it was causing such a kerfuffle that I was immediately called into a meeting at work, and then my job was over.
It had a guillotine kind of quality to that initial aspect because I just woke up, experienced this terror, and then got my head chopped off, and then the rest of the day was just shock. I was literally, I think, in shock because I was just like, what the hell just happened?
EZRA KLEIN: I know the folks well who work at Niskanen, which was the think tank you were at. I don’t believe they misunderstood that your tweet was a joke. So what happened there? Why do you think you got fired?
WILL WILKINSON: I think generalizing from my individual case, and I think this is indicative of one of the issues that has become prevalent, is that anybody that works at your institution, if they say something that’s a little bit controversial or that is taken out of context, it can cause a huge, very temporary storm of controversy online that draws attention to the institution.
Your boss might start getting hundreds of emails. They might start getting phone calls from people they don’t know, and it just escalates to this point where they feel like they have this really urgent PR crisis on their hands, and they have to do something quickly to manage it. And I think that that’s often a misperception and that managers panic because this is something that hasn’t happened before.
It wasn’t the case that your employee would go to a restaurant and tell a racy joke, and then all of a sudden the phone at your office is inundated with 250 voicemails, right? That didn’t used to happen. So people, I don’t think, are acclimated to this climate where anybody who’s associated with your organization can create this little crisis situation, but I think these are actually like tempests in teacups, and they do just blow over.
And in one way, social media has the memory of a goldfish. In another way, it never forgets anything and can dredge things from many years ago, but these things just pass, and they don’t really actually have that much of a, I don’t think, effect on the reputation of these institutions for long. It’s just that the technology that we’ve had is enough to create an experience that managers don’t know how to handle, and they flip out. (...)
EZRA KLEIN: Yeah I do think one of the strange things about this kind of political action is people in it don’t realize what they’re doing. I think you had quoted, Natalie, the line from Jon Ronson that the snowflake doesn’t take responsibility for the avalanche. I’m paraphrasing that from memory, but there’s something in that where you’re on Twitter, something’s trending or everybody’s talking about something, and you’re just jumping in with a joke.
You’re just participating in the day’s online conversation, and it doesn’t mean a lot to you. And Will, to what you were saying, and the individual might not even mean a lot to the person you’re making fun of or you’re attacking or you’re criticizing, but it is the emergent scale helped along by algorithms that ends up making it meaningful.
WILL WILKINSON: It’s definitely true what you say that a lot of times people just want to pipe up and have their say. This thing starts trending, or they see other people that they follow complaining about a particular article or about the particular horrible thing that somebody did, and they just chip in their two cents just to feel like they’re involved, and sometimes that scales up to something that’s really traumatic for the person who’s on the receiving end of it. But I think, over time, the way things have evolved is that people actually do understand this dynamic pretty well, and I only get this from people on the right.
I my own case, I could feel the dynamic. I could feel that there are people on Twitter who are looking for openings that they can strike through. Somebody saw the opening in my tweet, threw the harpoon into it, the horn went off, [HORN SOUND], called all the troops, and then people started swarming, but then there’s another layer. There’s these reporters for Breitbart and the Federalist and Fox News who are looking for these controversies because the fact that it becomes a controversy online is what makes it a story.
So the people who are creating the controversy know that they’re making a story. So there’s a kind of symbiosis there, and then my own case got picked up as a story in The Washington Examiner and the Federalist and Fox News, and then the top level of it is if it makes it all the way up to cable news broadcast on Fox.
EZRA KLEIN: Yeah. I had a line in my recent piece on this that Fox News isn’t anti-cancel culture. They just want to control the cancel culture, which I think is very much the right way to understand their prime time, but I want to start zooming out on this because I think a lot of what we end up talking about here is the purpose and utility of social shame. So Natalie, I ask this of you, what’s the case for and against in your view using social shame as a tool for social change?
NATALIE WYNN: Well, the for, the reason that people initially sort of were attracted to this, like the #MeToo movement, for example, I would say that it used social shaming often as a last resort against someone like Harvey Weinstein, who has used his position of power to abuse women for decades. In situations like that, it can be very good. It can attract a problem to an injustice or to someone who is abusing power.
The word accountability has kind of lost all meaning, but I think accountability is really just the left-wing word for punishment, but it can be used to punish people who seem immune to every other means of punishing and who, I suppose by most estimations, deserve it, but the negative is that, again, this is punishment administered without any kind of legal system. It’s pure mob justice.
And I think if you look at the history of mob justice, it’s pretty clear that that often can lead to witch trials and things like that where you basically have social resentments. People are being scapegoated. You have anger sort of directed almost arbitrarily at objects on whom all this kind of built up rage is unleashed. And oftentimes, the choice of target doesn’t make any sense.
by Ezra Klein with Natalie Wynn and Will Wilkinson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Illustration by The New York Times; Photographs by Natalie Wynn Parrott and, via Will Wilkinson
