In order to get going on the discussion, the first thing that needs to be made clear is that the origins of cancel culture are neither political nor cultural. Cancel culture arises from a structural change in the dynamics of social interaction facilitated by the development of social media. This is reflected in the fact that its basic features (manifest in what Ng refers to as cancellation practices) have been observed in countries all over the world and have been mobilized by individuals with a wide range of different political orientations.
In the United States, criticism of cancel culture has been deeply interwoven with controversies over “woke” politics, but as many commentators have noted, the internal dynamics of the Republican party exhibit many of the same characteristics. Fear of being labelled a RINO or cuck has had a disciplining effect on speech among conservatives that closely resembles the tyranny of speech codes on the left. So there is nothing intrinsically left-wing or woke about cancel culture. Furthermore, it is not a consequence of political polarization in the U.S., since cancellation has become an enormous issue in China as well, in this case with nationalist mobs policing online speech for minor slights, then extracting groveling confessions and apologies from celebrities.
Just this morning, I read an article about a Chinese chef who is being cancelled for posting a fried rice recipe on Weibo. (“As a chef, I will never make egg fried rice again,” Wang Gang, a celebrity chef with more than 10 million online fans, pledged in a video message on Monday. Wang’s “solemn apology” attempted to tame a frothing torrent of criticism about the video… ”) Sound familiar?
Reading this, any sensible person should be able to see there’s something going on that is new, weird, concerning, and much bigger and more important than our petty domestic political disputes. At the same time, it should be acknowledged that some people are still hold-outs, claiming that there is no such thing as cancel culture, that it’s just consequence culture, and so on. In my experience, this is a defensive reaction among those who enjoy participating in cancellation practices, most of whom seem to have a bad case of the “are we the baddies?” problem:
To put it simply, if you still don’t think that cancel culture is a problem, it’s probably because you’re a part of the problem.
On the other hand, apologists for cancel culture are correct to point out that there is nothing new about the reactions that certain forms of online speech are eliciting. That is, the social dynamics involved in cancel culture are not novel, they have been a feature of human social interaction for as long as we know. The difference is that certain strategies that individuals employ to manage interpersonal conflict have been potentiated by social media, generating mass phenomena that pose a new set of challenges.
Put succinctly, social media have dramatically expanded the power to individuals to recruit third parties to conflict. Human beings are distinctive in a variety of different ways, but one of the most important is that otherwise uninvolved third parties will often intervene in conflicts that erupt between strangers. In some cases this involves enforcement of the normative order. (...)
It’s not difficult to see how the internet generates massive amplification of people’s ability to solicit allies. Everyday conflicts that would traditionally have come and gone without notice to anyone but the parties involved can now be publicly prosecuted. People need only shoot some video, or take a picture, post it online, and invite others to take their side. It is often not difficult to find thousands, tens of thousands, sometimes even millions, who are happy to oblige. Consider this rather quotidian post to the /mildlyinfuriating subbreddit, which received over 4,400 upvotes and 176 comments, promoting it to the front page (“This is how my husband loads the dishwasher”):
This is the world we now live in. You can come home from work one day to find out, not just that your wife is mad at you, but that she has literally thousands of people on her side.
Of course, the idea that a minor domestic conflict of this sort should be a private matter, to be resolved among those directly affected, is a relatively recent one. As the institution of the charivari makes clear, people in medieval European societies took a keen interest in one another’s domestic affairs. Private life, as most of us understand it, is an 18th century innovation. The important point is not that society is reverting to an older set of norms, but that the scale of third-party intervention is vastly greater. This has dramatically enhanced people’s ability to escalate conflict, which has two notable effects. First, it has resulted in many minor conflicts, such as routine violations of etiquette, becoming much more severely contested and sanctioned. Second, it has made it possible to intimidate individuals and institutions in ways that had previously not been possible.
All of the talk about “social justice” has obscured many of these dynamics – the appropriate lens through which to understand the phenomenon of cancel culture is that of conflict theory. Indeed, one of the most frustrating things about contemporary “victimhood culture” is that so many complaints are lodged in a way that is self-evidently a form of relational aggression. This explains also why criticisms of cancel culture are likely to be ineffective at making it go away. The underlying human propensity to recruit third parties to conflict is unlikely to change, and the technological amplification of this capacity is clearly irreversible. Thus cancellation practices are not going to disappear. The only productive question is whether the way that people respond to these practices is likely to change.
by Joseph Heath, In Due Course | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Just Stop Making Official Statements About the News. A simple answer for every CEO, school president, and City Council (Intelligencer); Interesting site. See also, The futility of arguing against identity politics (IDC); and, Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks:]
[ed. See also: Just Stop Making Official Statements About the News. A simple answer for every CEO, school president, and City Council (Intelligencer); Interesting site. See also, The futility of arguing against identity politics (IDC); and, Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks:]
"In this context, what distinguishes Banks’ work is that he imagines a scenario in which technological development has also driven changes in the social structure, such that the social and political challenges people confront are new. Indeed, Banks distinguishes himself in having bothered to think carefully about the social and political consequences of technological development. For example, once a society has semi-intelligent drones that can be assigned to supervise individuals at all times, what need is there for a criminal justice system? Thus in the Culture, an individual who commits a sufficiently serious crime is assigned – involuntarily – a “slap drone,” who simply prevents that person from committing any crime again. Not only does this reduce recidivism to zero, the prospect of being supervised by a drone for the rest of one’s life also serves as a powerful deterrent to crime.
This is an absolutely plausible extrapolation from current trends – even just looking at how ankle monitoring bracelets work today. But it also raises further questions. For instance, once there is no need for a criminal justice system, one of the central functions of the state has been eliminated. This is one of the social changes underlying the political anarchism that is a central feature of the Culture. There is, however, a more fundamental postulate. The core feature of Banks’s universe is that he imagines a scenario in which technological development has freed culture from all functional constraints – and thus, he imagines a situation in which culture has become purely memetic. This is perhaps the most important idea in his work, but it requires some unpacking. (...)
This is an absolutely plausible extrapolation from current trends – even just looking at how ankle monitoring bracelets work today. But it also raises further questions. For instance, once there is no need for a criminal justice system, one of the central functions of the state has been eliminated. This is one of the social changes underlying the political anarchism that is a central feature of the Culture. There is, however, a more fundamental postulate. The core feature of Banks’s universe is that he imagines a scenario in which technological development has freed culture from all functional constraints – and thus, he imagines a situation in which culture has become purely memetic. This is perhaps the most important idea in his work, but it requires some unpacking. (...)
Societies with strong institutions become wealthier, more powerful militarily, or some combination of the two. These are the ones whose culture reproduces, either because it is imitated, or because it is imposed on others. And yet the dominant trend in human societies, over the past century, has been significant convergence with respect to institutional structure. Most importantly, there has been practically universal acceptance of the need for a market economy and a bureaucratic state as the only desirable social structure at the national level. One can think of this as the basic blueprint of a “successful” society. This has led to an incredible narrowing of cultural possibilities, as cultures that are functionally incompatible with capitalism or bureaucracy are slowly extinguished.
This winnowing down of cultural possibilities is what constitutes the trend that is often falsely described as “Westernization.” Much of it is actually just a process of adaptation that any society must undergo, in order to bring its culture into alignment with the functional requirements of capitalism and bureaucracy. It is not that other cultures are becoming more “Western,” it is that all cultures, including Western ones, are converging around a small number of variants."
