AHQ: Is Cancel Culture Cancelled?

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the ranks of the cancelled.

Dear Greta,

Is cancel culture cancelled??

Love,

Allie

Dear Allie,

Sometimes, a particular word or phrase becomes so suddenly popular that it loses meaning altogether (would anyone care to define neoliberalism for the crowd?). Or maybe it becomes appropriated by so many groups all using it for their own purposes that it takes on too many definitions––it becomes unfixed from any common understanding. I’d say cancel culture falls under that purview. In fact, in an earlier draft of this very response, I wrote out a definition of cancel culture just so we’d be on the same page about it, and Alex commented “I think this is a potentially contentious definition.” I thought I’d written something neutral! But now I think that’s impossible. Here’s what Dictionary.com, the most reputable source I could find, has to say:

“Cancel culture refers to the popular practice of withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive. Cancel culture is generally discussed as being performed on social media in the form of group shaming.”

The issue with any definition of cancel culture is that it is necessarily very broad. For one thing, the Dictionary.com definition says that public figures are the ones who get cancelled, when I’m pretty sure most people also assume that normal, non-celebrity people can also be cancelled. “Withdrawing support” is also vague––is withdrawing monetary support the same thing as withdrawing public support? 

Woody Allen was cancelled for being a pedophile, which looked like: a barrage of NYT opinion pieces, Hachette dropping his memoir, public condemnation from a series of celebrities, private condemnation over the dinner table in my house (and I assume in the houses of many others), and definite public shame. Concurrently to his cancellation, Allen found a new publisher for his memoir and continued to work on his movie “A Rainy Day in New York,” which is topping the global box office as I type. Obviously, that is not a comprehensive list of what it means to “cancel” somebody, so let’s look at another example. 

Taylor Swift has been canceled more or less an infinite number of times, most recently for the drama where she claimed to not have approved of a line in Kanye West’s song Famous (Kanye is also cancelled), and was later exposed by Kim Kardashian (also cancelled) who had recorded the phone call where the consent took place. That cancellation looked like: a lot of articles using that instance as a jumping-off point to talk about white feminism, and people replying to any of her posts with snake emojis. Swift has gone on since to make two albums, each of which was nominated for a Grammy. 

There’s really only one form of cancelling I can think of that I’ve witnessed on an interpersonal, non-celebrity level. At parties, hosts will post “no perps” in the Facebook description, and promise to kick out any known perpetrators of sexual assault who are bothering people at the party.

Are those three examples of cancel culture truly equatable? Are their motivations?

The New York Times wrote that “an act of cancellation is still mostly conceptual or socially performative. Despite the hordes who declared him canceled, Logan Paul is still making videos (albeit, less regularly). And Kanye West saw his recently released album debut at No. 1 on the Billboard chart.”

This is an important addendum to the definition we’re working with here. Cancel culture, like the #MeToo movement, is discussed as if it has real effects on the long term livelihoods of those targeted, but that rarely seems to be the case. Instead of actually affecting a person’s ability to continue with their work, or even decreasing their level of celebrity, cancel culture’s primary effect is the thing laid out in that original definition: shame. Cancel culture takes the mood for ransom. It’s a mood boycott. 

Because she’d been cancelled, Taylor Swift couldn’t make an Instagram post without being barraged with comments of snake emojis. So she turned off comments on her posts. Honestly, I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. First of all, let’s be real: obviously, Taylor Swift absolutely has a second, secret Instagram account for her friends and family. And if she doesn’t, she should! My fundamental belief about cancel culture is that if you’re going to have a public social media account, you should be prepared to be held accountable for the things you say in public. Anyone––even the extremely famous––has the ability to make a private account where they won’t be cancelled by random people on the internet. 

A corollary, but I think my certitude about this comes from my belief in de-platforming. I don’t think being kicked off social media is akin to banishing someone from society. White supremacists and first amendment absolutists say that everyone deserves to say anything they want, in any capacity, at any time. I don’t think that’s true––we can moderate shared spaces. The internet is not real life, and given that each of us is given the option of the complete freedom of a private account, there is no reason the public accounts shouldn’t be liable to moderation.

This reasoning only accounts for the cancellations that happen online––not those that happen in person. However, my personal experience with cancel culture offline is extremely limited. For instance, the example I have earlier of perpetrators of sexual assault not being invited to parties has much more to do with safety, in my mind, than it does with performing shame. Obviously, just because I haven’t witnessed in-person cancel culture doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened––however, when I tried to find examples, I instead came across this article where teens describe their experiences with cancel culture. By their accounts, “in person cancelling” is either A) a jokey way to begin to talk about someone’s racist behavior with them, or B) just a new label for a thing people have done forever: immaturely deciding they don’t want to be friends with someone anymore. (If any teens are reading this and want to elaborate, feel free to comment on this post). I just don’t want to claim that people are getting fully abandoned by their support networks in person without good reason wholly because of cancel culture, a new cultural phenomenon, when I don’t have specific evidence to support it. 

Asking if cancel culture is cancelled sets an extremely low bar for my opinion of cancel culture as a whole. I think it’s one of those phrases that doesn’t really mean anything in particular, and that it doesn’t have the damning effect it is hyped up to have. I don’t necessarily like it, and I certainly think there are better ways to address problematic behavior in public. But I don’t think that cancel culture is fundamentally corrupt, and am glad we all have the option to opt in to private accounts online. So, no, cancel culture isn’t cancelled.

Love,

Greta

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