A case against "The Case For Cancel Culture"
Cancel culture is neither liberalising nor democratic
There is often a certain level of disingenuousness around conversations about “cancel culture”; very often, people will claim there is no such thing, or talk about consequences, or whatever. Just today, Adam Bienkov fell into that same tired trap.
So in a way, it’s refreshing to see an article admitting it exists, by somebody supportive of the phenomenon. A cheer for Ernest Owens, then, who has written a book called “The Case for Cancel Culture: How This Democratic Tool Works to Liberate Us All”. The idea that cancel culture is democratic and liberating is completely wrong-headed, but it is at least a bit more honest.
Released on Tuesday, I’ve not had a chance to read the book yet, though helpfully an excerpt was placed in Rolling Stone this week. Interestingly, the article doesn’t provide a definition of what the author thinks “cancel culture” is, but I think we can take a guess based on a reading of the piece; it frames cancel culture as a way of humbling the rich and powerful, and a means for everyone’s voices to be heard equally.
If the book rests on this assumption it will be an intellectual disaster, but most importantly, it will not be an argument in favour of what cancel culture actually is.
Suppose we take this assumption at face value, that cancel culture is a way of getting even with the influential and wealthy, and consider some rich and powerful people who have been targets of attempted cancellations. Louis CK sold out Madison Square Garden this year. Joe Rogan was given millions of dollars to host his podcast on Spotify. Hogwarts Legacy, a role-playing game set in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter universe, is currently breaking all sorts of sales records.
Whatever you think about these individuals, it’s fairly clear that cancel culture is having very little impact on the careers of the rich and powerful (though I am sure it will have been an unpleasant experience).
But there is a more interesting point here. Owens claims that the “potential for cancel culture is democracy uncensored and unchained”, when the evidence points very strongly in the other direction. If cancel culture was genuinely The Voice Of The People, why do The People keep paying to see Louis CK, listen to Joe Rogan, and play Harry Potter games in big numbers?
The truth is, cancel culture is not democratic at all. It is a tool of a small number of highly motivated internet activists who evidently hold views way out of step with the majority of the population. Cancel culture is not about speaking truth to power. It is about online bullies trying to force their views into a culturally dominant position by attempting to ostracise anyone who steps out of line. Frustrated by an inability to achieve anything in the democratic sphere, cancel culture advocates instead try to sidestep popular consent by coercing societal change via harassment.
A common tactic is to contact a victim’s employers. Internet hounding led to Justine Sacco losing her job; the same happened to Gillian Philip, Emmanuel Cafferty, David Shor, Kara Lynne, and plenty of others. Companies still get far too twitchy when a completely unrepresentative online mob turns up in their notifications. Firms have a duty to their employees too, and should not give ground any time some random social media user kicks up a fuss. (As an aside, I don’t think it is a coincidence that cancel culture supporters very often seem to work in competitive fields and tend to be professionally frustrated).
The rich and powerful aren’t affected by cancelling, but those with less affluence and influence clearly are. Nor should cancel culture be understood solely in terms of its direct impact. One of the more insidious elements of the phenomenon is the chilling effect it has on speech. Activists can’t bring Rogan or Rowling down, but they can increase the cost of publicly supporting them. Their antagonistic approach has the effect of silencing people who are less professionally or financially secure; robbing people of their right to state their opinion by threat of penury. As Freddie de Boer writes here, even if Joe Rogan is unaffected, the whole controversy will have been noted by Spotify, by other companies, by other podcasters, pour encourager les autres.
In a democracy, we should all have the right to speak. Societal consensus is reached by discussion and debate, and plurality of opinion is an essential component of a healthy liberal democracy. Cancel culture, then, is not liberating or democratising. Instead it works hard to shut down anyone who disagrees by threatening heavy penalties. It is not progressive to try and enforce the same opinion on everyone. Nor is it progressive to try and get people fired for wrongthink. The great liberal thinker John Stuart Mill had plenty to say about societal censorship; he would have scoffed at the idea that this approach is in keeping with liberal democratic ideals.
Even if activists won’t concede the moral case against cancel culture, they ought to at least consider more practical implications. One of the key actors involved in the cancelling of Justine Sacco was himself subject to cancellation a year later. It is not at all unusual to find that the most hardline social justice activists have older social media posts which use all manner of offensive epithets. Nobody knows what the cultural mores of the 2030s will be, and it is very possible that today’s chief cancellers are loading Chekhov’s gun for themselves at the moment. Societal norms may not always be in your favour. The cancellation crocodile will come for everyone in the end.
But the main argument against cancel culture is moral. We all have to live together, and nobody has the right to suppress others’ speech like this. The rich and powerful will always be able to enjoy free speech; it is beneficial for everyone else that free speech is extended to all, but this is the opposite of what cancel culture does. Cancel culture is not liberating or democratic, but it is authoritarian, bullying, intolerant and myopic, in the same way a lot of activism currently seems to be. The bottom line is that none of this is progressive, or socially just, and just because some people you don’t like oppose cancel culture, that doesn’t make it good.
I started by commending Ernest Owens’ honesty in admitting that cancel culture is real. But if he can’t pin down what it actually is, misdiagnosing it as a war against the untouchable, I’m not sure his book will get us very far.