Cancel Culture
Nov. 3rd, 2019 09:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat Cancel Culture
A few weeks ago, Neelam, a high school senior, was sitting in class at her Catholic school in Chicago. After her teacher left the room, a classmate began playing “Bump N’ Grind,” an R. Kelly song.
Neelam, 17, had recently watched the documentary series “Surviving R. Kelly” with her mother. She said it had been “emotional to take in as a black woman.”
Neelam asked the boy and his cluster of friends to stop playing the track, but he shrugged off the request. “‘It’s just a song,’” she said he replied. “‘We understand he’s in jail and known for being a pedophile, but I still like his music.’”
She was appalled. They were in a class about social justice. They had spent the afternoon talking about Catholicism, the common good and morality. The song continued to play.
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That classmate, who is white, had done things in the past that Neelam described as problematic, like casually using racist slurs — not name-calling — among friends. After class, she decided he was “canceled,” at least to her.
Her decision didn’t stay private; she told a friend that week that she had canceled him. She told her mother too. She said that this meant she would avoid speaking or engaging with him in the future, that she didn’t care to hear what he had to say, because he wouldn’t change his mind and was beyond reason.
“When it comes to cancel culture, it’s a way to take away someone’s power and call out the individual for being problematic in a situation,” Neelam said. “I don’t think it’s being sensitive. I think it’s just having a sense of being observant and aware of what’s going on around you.”
The term “canceled” “sort of spawned from YouTube,” said Ben, a high school junior in Providence, R.I. (Because of their age and the situations involved, The New York Times has granted partial anonymity to some people. We have confirmed details with parents or schoolmates.)
He talked about the YouTuber James Charles, who was canceled by the platform’s beauty community in May after some drama with his mentor, Tati Westbrook, also a YouTuber, and a vitamin entrepreneur. That was a big cancellation, widely covered, that helped popularize the term. Teenagers often bring it up.
Ben, 17, said that people should be held accountable for their actions, whether they’re famous or not, but that canceling someone “takes away the option for them to learn from their mistakes and kind of alienates them.”
His school doesn’t have much bullying, he said, and the word carries a gentler meaning in its hallways, used in passing to tease friends. Often, the joke extends beyond people. One week, after students were debating the safety of e-cigarettes and vaping, some declared that Juul was canceled.
It took some time for L to understand that she had been canceled. She was 15 and had just returned to a school she used to attend. “All the friends I had previously had through middle school completely cut me off,” she said. “Ignored me, blocked me on everything, would not look at me.”
Months went by. Toward the end of sophomore year, she reached out over Instagram to a former friend, asking why people were not talking to her. It was lunchtime; the person she asked was sitting in the cafeteria with lots of people and so they all piled on. It was like an avalanche, L said.
Within a few minutes she got a torrent of direct messages from the former friend on Instagram, relaying what they had said. One said she was a mooch. One said she was annoying and petty. One person said that she had ruined her self-esteem. Another said that L was an emotional leech who was thirsty for validation.
“This put me in a situation where I thought I had done all these things,” L said. “I was bad. I deserved what was happening.”
Two years have passed since then. “You can do something stupid when you’re 15, say one thing and 10 years later that shapes how people perceive you,” she said. “We all do cringey things and make dumb mistakes and whatever. But social media’s existence has brought that into a place where people can take something you did back then and make it who you are now.”
In her junior year, L said, things got better. Still, that rush of messages and that social isolation have left a lasting impact. “I’m very prone to questioning everything I do,” she said. “‘Is this annoying someone?’ ‘Is this upsetting someone?’”
“I have issues with trusting perfectly normal things,” she said. “That sense of me being some sort of monster, terrible person, burden to everyone, has stayed with me to some extent. There’s still this sort of lingering sense of: What if I am?”
Alex is 17, and she hears the word “canceled” every day at her high school outside Atlanta. It can be a joke, but it can also suggest that an offending person won’t be tolerated again. Alex thinks of it as a permanent label. “Now they’ll forever be thought of as that action, not for the person they are,” she said.
“It’s not like you’ll sit away from them at lunch or something,” she said. “It’s just a lingering thought in the back of your mind, a negative connotation.”
During a mock trial practice a couple of weeks before a big competition, the song “Act Up” by City Girls was playing. One of Alex’s teammates, who is of Indian descent, rapped along with the lyrics, which include a racist slur.
The students, who until that point had been chatty because their teacher wasn’t in the room, went silent. “I was the only black person in the room,” Alex said.
Alex and another friend on the team explained to their teammate why he shouldn’t have used that word. “We’re a team, so we can’t have tension exist there,” she said.
He said he understood why they were uncomfortable but that it wouldn’t necessarily prevent him from using it again when singing along. He wouldn’t take it back.
“You’re canceled, sis,” her friend told the teammate. It was partially to lighten the mood, but also partly serious.
“It’s a joke, but still, we understand you have that opinion now and we’re not going to get closer,” Alex said.
Despite his initial tough stance, the teammate didn’t rap the word again, and Alex said that he had remained respectful during practice. The team took ninth and 11th place at the competition.
It was orientation day for freshmen at Sarah Lawrence College, where one new student was unnerved by a social justice group’s presentation. The presenters discussed pronoun use and called on the entering freshmen to “‘battle heteronormativity and cisgender language,’” the student said.
Even if you accidentally misgendered someone, the new students were told, you needed to be either called out or called in. (“Called in” means to be gently led to understand your error; call-outs are more aggressive.) The presenters emphasized that the impact on the person who was misgendered was what mattered, regardless of the intent of the person who had misgendered them.
The freshman thought back to a time when her father had misgendered a friend of hers. Her father had asked her to apologize on his behalf. She did. “‘I only get mad when people intentionally try to misgender me because they feel like they have to correct who I am,’” she recalled her friend saying.
Sarah Lawrence has fewer than 1,500 undergraduates. One upperclassman she became friends with said that she had been canceled in her own freshman year.
But, this upperclassman said, the politics enforced through cancellation don’t always fit neatly into the social dynamics of college.
“I think where it loses me, we’re taking these systems that are applying huge abstract ideas of identity’s role and we’re shrinking it into these interpersonal, one-on-one, liberal arts things,” the upperclassman said.
Among the upperclassman’s friend group now, the idea of cancellation is “basically a joke.” Too many people had been canceled. At a recent party the upperclassman had attended, one guy said, “‘If you haven’t been canceled, you’re canceled.’”
One night during Mike’s freshman year at a New York state college, he and a group of friends were headed to a party downtown. As they were waiting for their Uber, someone cracked a political joke, and then the casual conversation turned confrontational. One of Mike’s friends asked his roommate, D, if he was a Trump supporter.
D had a history of making the group uncomfortable. Mike and their mutual friend Phoebe said that he would make sexist, homophobic and racist remarks in past hangouts.
D said he did support the president — an anomaly in their liberal friend group — and “blew up” at the friend who asked the question. When the friend tried to change the subject, he became more upset. Mike stepped between the two to defuse the situation. “He got in my friend’s face, and that was the last straw,” Mike said.
He tried to cool D down; it didn’t work. D called Mike a homophobic slur, multiple times. The group split up. Mike didn’t return to his dorm that night, staying at a friend’s place instead.
“Even before this, we could tell, if I weren’t roommates with him, we wouldn’t have been friends,” Mike said. “So that was the breaking point for me, him saying that when I was sticking up for him.”
D left an apology note on Mike’s desk, which mostly tried to “justify his actions,” Mike said. “That set in my mind that he didn’t really feel bad about what he did,” he said. “He just felt bad for himself, that he would be looked at in a different light.”
A couple of days later, Phoebe, Mike and D sat down and D repeated the apology. Phoebe and Mike heard him out but said it didn’t clear him of wrongdoing and that he would have to demonstrate that he was different now. Both said that while D appeared sad about losing his friends, tearing up during their discussion, he didn’t show remorse.
Other friends didn’t accept the apology. “We wouldn’t tolerate it anymore, we cut him out of our lives,” Phoebe said.
Thus canceled, D moved from sadness to frustration and anger, Phoebe said. He grew “very bitter,” she said. She noticed that he had unfollowed and blocked the group on Snapchat and other social media a few weeks later.
“He did feel bullied by this whole canceled idea,” she said. “But in this case, no one felt bad doing it, because he didn’t really take responsibility for a lot of the things he said.”
Mike, though, still lives with D. He had signed on to live with him before the ordeal. They don’t speak. D has stopped acknowledging Mike and most everyone from their old group. “I’m definitely not living with him next year,” Mike said.
Phoebe managed to keep things civil. “Every time we see him, I still say hi,” she said. Sometimes, but not always, he nods or says hi back.
What Obama States About Cancel Culture -- and how it is NOT activism
Former President Barack Obama made a rare foray into the cultural conversation this week, objecting to the prevalence of “call-out culture” and “wokeness” during an interview about youth activism at the Obama Foundation summit on Tuesday.
For more than an hour, Mr. Obama sat onstage with the actress Yara Shahidi and several other young leaders from around the world. The conversation touched on “leadership, grass roots change and the power places have to shape our journeys,” the Obama Foundation said, but it was his remarks about young activists that have ricocheted around the internet, mostly receiving praise from a cohort of bipartisan and intergenerational supporters.
“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff,” Mr. Obama said. “You should get over that quickly.”
“The world is messy; there are ambiguities,” he continued. “People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you.”
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Mr. Obama spoke repeatedly of the role of social media in activism specifically, including the idea of what’s become known as “cancel culture,” which is much remarked upon, but still nebulously defined. It tends to refer to behavior that mostly plays out on the internet when someone has said or done something to which others object. That person is then condemned in a flurry of social media posts. Such people are often referred to as “canceled,” a way of saying that many others (and perhaps the places at which they work) are fed up with them and will have no more to do with them.
Mr. Obama talked about conversations he’s had with his daughter Malia, who is a student at Harvard with Ms. Shahidi.
“I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes of: ‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people,’” he said, “and that’s enough.”
“Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb,” he said, “then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, ‘Man, you see how woke I was, I called you out.’”
Then he pretended to sit back and press the remote to turn on a television.
“That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change,” he said. “If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.”
Reminds me of a discussion I had with a co-worker recently...
Coworker holding up pencil: what is this?
ME: A pencil.
Coworker points to erasure: what is this?
Me: An erasure.
Coworker: People make mistakes. We all do. We're human.
The NY Times has a series of fascinating articles on this...
Those People We Tried to Cancel? They are All Hanging Out Together
The term for people who have been thrust out of social or professional circles in this way — either online or in the real world or sometimes both — is “canceled.”
This week, even Barack Obama spoke about online denunciation, personal purity and being “politically woke,” saying, “If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far.”
There are varying degrees of cancellation. Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, Harvey Weinstein and other men have been canceled for serial sexual assault or harassment; non-famous abusers and predatory media executives have been canceled as well.
The merely offensive (Roseanne Barr, Shane Gillis) are somewhere down the scale, adjacent to the provocative or clueless or callous (Dave Chappelle, Scarlett Johansson).
At the bottom end, cancellation consists of some mild, inconsequential criticism. On YouTube, vloggers cancel each other and even themselves with startling regularity, often for petty or invented grievances.
Ms. Herzog became a member of a unique emerging class of people — journalists, academics, opinion writers — canceled for bad, conservative or offensive opinions.
As it happens, cancellation is bringing many of them together.
Here Is the Attention We All Ordered
Alice Dreger, a former Northwestern University professor, estimated she has counseled “about 100” people through their experiences being canceled. In doing so, she has become part of an “informal peer network” that includes two pugnacious writer-personalities: Christina Hoff Sommers, who rose to prominence defending Gamergate and coining “victim feminism,” and Meghan Murphy, who opposed adding gender identity to Canada’s human rights act.
Ms. Herzog had interviewed Ms. Dreger for her piece on trans people. “I told her, ‘You’re going to get slaughtered for this.’ She just laughed,” Ms. Dreger said. “Six months later, she gave me a call.”
“Katie thought what we all thought: The truth will save me. That’s what Galileo thought, too, and he died under house arrest. The same thing has happened to us.”
Ms. Dreger is neither dead nor under house arrest, but she has become a resource for the canceled because of her 2015 book, “Galileo’s Middle Finger,” about when intellectuals are vilified. (In part, it recounts the story of J. Michael Bailey, who endorses a theory called “autogynephilia” as a factor in gender transitions; many trans people say that tying their identity to sexual arousal is offensive.)
Ms. Dreger’s chief concern is ensuring that the canceled person has access to mental health care, she said. The experience of public scorn is psychologically damaging.
“There’s an effect to being constantly told, in public, that you’re wrong and evil,” said Kathleen Stock, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex in England.
Ms. Stock has also received strong criticism for her writings on trans people. (She describes herself as “gender critical.”) She said she is “anathema” in certain philosophy factions.
She has also corresponded with Ms. Herzog and Jesse Singal, another journalist who has been scorned for his writing on trans people, and has developed genuine friendships with like-minded academics. “Some of us have even been on holiday together,” Ms. Stock said.
The Cancellation Media Ecosystem
“I’m an ambulance chaser for the canceled,” joked Jonathan Kay, an editor of Quillette, an online publication that touts itself as a defender of free speech and has emerged as a home for the canceled to plead their cases.
Ms. Stock used Quillette to reassert her views. “I’ve found defending myself in print is the best thing I can do to feel better by myself,” she said.
Mr. Kay clarified that Quillette will not publish just anyone, however. “Being canceled is like autism — it’s a spectrum,” he said. Harvey Weinstein would be a “no” for him.
“We’re much more interested in the opposite end of the spectrum, where you have people who have been accused of things that are much less serious, and don’t nearly approach a criminal level,” Mr. Kay said.
Readers want to hear from the canceled, but the larger motivation is philosophical. Quillette’s editorial point of view is that so-called cancel culture is overly punitive and lacks nuance.
“When I went to law school, in the ’90s, the presumption of innocence was seen as a progressive value,” Mr. Kay said. “Because who is mostly wrongly accused of crime? Racialized minorities. Blacks, Hispanics, the poor. More often than not, it protects marginalized communities. And now the presumption of innocence is seen as a conservative value. And that troubles me.”
Bridget Phetasy hosts the “Walk-Ins Welcome” podcast, which she said “has become the island of misfit toys.” The show has featured people like Andrew Doyle, a British comedian, and Mitchell Sunderland, a freelance writer who was fired from Vice.
“I don’t see myself as someone who’s been canceled as much as someone who’s willing to sit down and associate with the canceled,” Ms. Phetasy said. “I’m an ally of the canceled.”
She is also friends with Art Tavana, who has the dubious distinction of having been maybe-canceled twice. In 2016, he wrote an ode to the sex appeal of the pop musician Sky Ferreira for LA Weekly. (The editor of the article apologized.)
Mr. Tavana’s second cancellation came at Playboy in 2018; he was hired as a conservative columnist. “My three best friends straight up told me, ‘I don’t want to talk to you anymore,’” he said. “One friend, we had known each other since kindergarten.”
Playboy, he said, decided that he was not a good fit for its more progressive look. His ouster spurred a kinship with Ms. Phetasy, a fellow former Playboy columnist.“We both felt like we had been shoved out for not being woke enough,” Mr. Tavana said.
Her podcast has also featured Dave Rubin, who has created a media organization, the Rubin Report, around his cancellation.
“My show has become a hub for misunderstood or canceled people or to-be-canceled people to express themselves honestly,” Mr. Rubin said.
Mr. Rubin began his digital media career in 2013 at The Young Turks, a leftist news organization, but branched out on his own in 2016.
“Suddenly all of these people who were being lambasted in the media came on my show, and we became legitimate friends,” Mr. Rubin said. He did a tour with Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor turned motivational speaker. Mr. Rubin also regularly dines with Peter Thiel, the libertarian venture capitalist, and is friends with Ben Shapiro, who is against abortion and diversity but for Ted Cruz.
On Mr. Rubin’s show, Mr. Shapiro said that organizations should be able to refuse service to same-sex married couples on religious grounds, and that straight couples are better parents than gay couples. (Mr. Rubin lives in Los Angeles with his husband.)
Obviously, Mr. Rubin declined to cancel Mr. Shapiro. “We can remain friends and agree to disagree,” Mr. Rubin said. “I believe in the long game: If you show people respect, then some of these guys who are religiously against gay marriage, they’ll probably come around because they’ve met some decent gay men.”
This association with right-wing figures has cost Mr. Rubin several friendships, including with people who attended his wedding. Mr. Rubin says he is happier being canceled. “Woke progressives are a pretty miserable bunch,” he said. “Try joking with that group.”
The Intellectual Gray Area
Meghan Murphy and Cathy Young used to square off regularly on Twitter. “She wrote some really nasty things about me,” Ms. Young said.
Ms. Murphy called Ms. Young a “virulent anti-feminist” and an apologist for men’s rights activists.
But they buried the hatchet at, yes, a Quillette party in Toronto. “She basically said that she really came to understand the importance of letting people have their own opinions, even if some people consider them offensive,” Ms. Young said.
That Quillette party is also where Ms. Murphy met Jamie Kilstein, a comedian who was fired from a progressive radio show after a number of women accused him of sexually predatory and emotionally abusive behavior. “We hated each other on Twitter,” Ms. Murphy said. “And he was at the Quillette party, and I said, ‘Hey!’ And he was like, ‘Hey!’”
Mr. Singal also connected with Mr. Kilstein. “I probably would have been too scared to get breakfast with Kilstein before I dealt with this,” Mr. Singal said.
Mr. Singal has written frequently on trans people in ways that have upset vocal members of that community. His stature has only grown, including on Twitter, where he mocks woke culture and identity politics. He is one of many who simultaneously talk about their cancellation experience while also noting that they also haven’t really been canceled.
“I have lost Twitter friends, but I haven’t lost real-life friends,” he said. “My friends are normies.”
On Oct. 28, completing some kind of circle, he appeared on Quillette’s podcast, discussing his experience. (He also appeared on the podcast in January.)
“The experience of seeing an insane caricature of yourself pop up online makes you more sympathetic to anyone else who has been through this thing,” he said.
Mr. Singal and Ms. Murphy may be case studies for people who don’t believe “cancel culture” is real, or effective. Twitter-based outrage hasn’t had a lasting, adverse effect on their careers or social lives. It has become a central part of their online personas.
For Ms. Murphy, getting canceled has brought her into contact with people she once considered her “political enemies.”
She was banned from Twitter for “targeted misgendering” and then sued Twitter over the decision. (She lost the suit but said she is currently in the appeal process.) While she thought it would hurt her writing career, she said the opposite occurred. “People tried to cancel me, and I was un-cancelable,” Ms. Murphy said. “It backfired, and I gained a bigger profile.”
She was defended by “people I never would have considered and talked to before — anti-feminists, men who think feminism is stupid and it’s about hating men,” Ms. Murphy said. Mr. Shapiro reached out to her to offer his support.
The Canceled-Adjacent Problematic Club
In May 2016, Mandy Stadtmiller wrote a first-person essay about her husband being a supporter of Donald Trump. She was inundated with messages urging her to divorce him. She lost a couple of “close” friends. She grew increasingly disillusioned from the New York media clique she was once eager to join.
“It was crazy-making to have a lot of people telling me, ‘You’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong,’” Ms. Stadtmiller said.
She also experienced a “chill in work,” she said. “Some of the top decision makers at different media outlets very much made it clear they were not as excited to use me as they once had been,” she said.
“There’s never been a ‘Mandy Stadtmiller is canceled’ party,” she said. “I look at it as being — I don’t know what the word is. ‘Canceled adjacent,’ maybe.”
She also found solace in speaking with Ms. Herzog and Mr. Sunderland, whom she had known for a while. But the closest relationship Ms. Stadtmiller formed was with Keri Smith, a self-identified former “social justice warrior.”
Ms. Smith was a leftist comedy producer. She was an executive producer of “Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell,” which is what she calls “the first SJW late night show.” (“SJW” stands for “social justice warriors.”)
Then she wrote an essay for Medium: “On Leaving the SJW Cult and Finding Myself.”
Ms. Stadtmiller traveled to stay with Ms. Smith for a month, in her home north of Austin, Texas. “I actually helped her turn it into an Airbnb!” Ms. Stadtmiller said. “I need friends like I need oxygen. So in reaching out to people who wouldn’t start screaming at me because I was Eva Braun or something, I developed richer, more real friendships.”
Who Runs the Culture?
The social cost of associating with the canceled can be greater than being canceled, said Andrew Doyle, the British comic. People remain silent.
Mr. Doyle runs a parody Twitter account about identity politics and cancel culture. He said his work has been described as “racist” and “misogynist.” (“I’ve had one friend literally scream at me in the pub,” he said.)
He reached out to Lisa Hardcastle when her similar Twitter account was suspended in 2018.
Now they, too, are friends, and attend shows at a comedy club Mr. Doyle founded, where the operating ethos is “no self-censorship.”
“In any witch hunt, the people who get the worst treatment are the ones who try to defend the witches and not the witches themselves,” he said. “Anyone who’s read ‘The Crucible’ knows that.”
Cancellation does present a question about power, and who has it.
“The biggest problem we have as a culture is that we can’t define who the establishment is,” Mr. Tavana said. “Is the establishment the woke media people who own 99 percent of the keyboards in the country, or is it the old, canceled guys in media? Who’s the punk rock band and who’s the corporate rock band?”
Mr. Rubin imagines a near future where everyone is canceled for 15 minutes.
“The woke progressives are going to implode, and pretty soon they’ll destroy everything,” he said. “It’s just a matter of how much will they take down with them. They’re going to cancel Barack Obama one day, because Obama ran against gay marriage at one time.”
Mr. Shapiro said, “Our culture is dying because we have no capacity for forgiveness or discussion.”
That Which Does Not Kill Them
“There have been attempts to cancel me, but I cannot be canceled, because I refuse to be canceled,” Ms. Herzog said
“I’ve certainly lost a lot of friends and had a lot of abuse online and damage to my reputation and livelihood,” Mr. Doyle said, “but that’s not the same thing as being canceled. I’m still able to do the work I want to do. If you retreat away, it makes you the victim. We don’t want to be considered victims.”
“They can’t cancel you if you don’t care,” Ms. Phetasy said.
“My cancellation, if you want to call it that, has been the greatest thing to ever happen to me,” Mr. Rubin said.
“SJWs don’t have friends, they have allies,” Ms. Smith said. “And your allies leave as soon as you’re not speaking the ideology anymore.”
Ms. Murphy describes her cancellation as “a gift.”
As Ms. Herzog has begun to advise other people through their cancellations, her advice to them is to embrace being canceled.
“It’s deeply painful, but it can be positive in many ways,” she said. “Before this happened, I was much more dogmatic, I was more of a purist. I’m smarter, I’m more skeptical, I’m more empathetic, and I’m much less quick to judge than I was before. And I’m much less sure of my own correctness.”
“Which is why I hope everyone is canceled,” she said.
Almost Everyone Worth Knowing Has Been Cancelled By Someone
Almost everyone worth knowing has been canceled by someone.
Bill Gates is canceled. Gwen Stefani and Erykah Badu are canceled. Despite his relatively strong play in the World Cup, Cristiano Ronaldo has been canceled. Taylor Swift is canceled and Common is canceled and, Wednesday, Antoni Porowski, a “Queer Eye” fan favorite was also canceled. Needless to say, Kanye West is canceled, too.
Also canceled: concepts! 2018 is “officially, extremely canceled,” and so is love. And, inevitably, saying something “is canceled” is also canceled.
In these cases, the word refers to total disinvestment in something (anything), and this usage can be traced back several years. But in the last few months, it’s been everywhere. The most popular definition of the concept on Urban Dictionary was posted in March and four of the nine definitions listed were added in just the last two years.
There’s a hierarchy to being canceled: Celebrities who say things many people find unacceptable, like Kanye, who suggested slavery was a choice, or Shania Twain, who said she would have voted for President Trump were she not a Canadian person, have been canceled en masse.
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In a recent interview with The New York Times, Kanye fretted extensively about being canceled, using some form of the word seven separate times. “I’m canceled. I’m canceled because I didn’t cancel Trump,” he said.
But not all cancellations are the result of transgressing fans’ expectations. Sometimes they happen for no stated reason. All it takes for someone to be canceled is for someone else to announce, via social media, that they are. And so even the seemingly blameless — Yara Shahidi, Rowan Blanchard, Chris Evans, etc. — have been canceled. Lena Waithe is one of few celebrities who thus far seems to have avoided cancellation, but perhaps it is imminent.
What Does It Mean to Be Canceled?
“To me, it’s ultimately an expression of agency,” said Meredith Clark, a professor at the University of Virginia’s department of media studies. “To a certain extent: I really do think of it like a breakup and a taking back of one’s power.” Canceling, she said, is an act of withdrawing from someone whose expression — whether political, artistic or otherwise — was once welcome or at least tolerated, but no longer is.
“It’s a cultural boycott,” said Lisa Nakamura, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies the intersection of digital media and race, gender and sexuality. “It’s an agreement not to amplify, signal boost, give money to. People talk about the attention economy — when you deprive someone of your attention, you’re depriving them of a livelihood.”
Who Can Be Canceled?
If you announce that someone is canceled, they’re canceled. But it gets more complicated.
Some people are more widely recognized as being canceled than others, and cancellation frequently comes in a groundswell as a response to a person’s comments or actions. Student Edge, an Australian website with articles written by high school and college students, announced in January that Twitter users “had decided to cancel Cardi B” after she defended the rapper Offset, her husband, for rapping that he “cannot vibe with queers.”
Ms. Clark said that only those whose power is, for the most part, predicated on the attention economy are susceptible to cancellation. Which means that political figures and business leaders are harder to cancel — even rhetorically — because the threat only goes so far.
“A political figure has the ability to weigh in on something beyond discourse,” she said. “The best you can do with canceling someone is cutting off attention, your time and your money. Canceling is not enough of a disruptive practice to take a politician out of office.”
Because cancellation takes place online, it can have a pan-continental effect. Aisha Rimi, who works at the London School of Economics and has blogged about cancel culture, said: “When someone’s canceled on black American Twitter, they tend to be canceled on black U.K. Twitter.”
Why Is Everyone Getting Canceled Now?
In a subscription-heavy era where everything is on-demand, and celebrities are packaged and sold as commodities, the language of cancellation is close at hand. The usage is widely understood to have come from Black Twitter, the loose networks of black users active on the site.
An early example of the term’s rise: In a 2016 episode of the web series “Joanne the Scammer,” the title character struggles to use an espresso machine, then declares the entire enterprise to be canceled. Jason Richards, who wrote the episode, said it came from something that Branden Miller, who created Joanne, had said online several times.
“I think the humor of it comes from how inhumane it is,” Mr. Richards said. “To cancel a human is just a funny way of putting it. Joanne is someone who scams people, and the word canceled seems of that world, of reservations being canceled and credit cards being canceled.”
“It speaks to a lifestyle of commodity, consumerism and capitalism, of transactions being canceled,” he said. “It’s a very transactional word.”
Ms. Nakamura said that cancel culture was born of a desire for control. People have limited power over what is presented to them on social media platforms, which are notorious for being poorly regulated. When YouTube refused to defenestrate Logan Paul after he posted a deeply insensitive video in December, she said, individuals were compelled to take matters into their own hands, doing the work of deplatforming him instead of waiting on deliverance from YouTube.
“Socially irredeemable things are said on platforms all the time,” Ms. Nakamura said. Cancellation creates “a culture of accountability which is not centralized and is haphazard, but needed to come into being.”
Is Anyone Ever Really Canceled?
Celebrities who are also television personalities — like Bill O’Reilly, Charlie Rose and Roseanne Barr — have had their shows quite literally canceled. That is due, in some part, to public pressure.
But 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.
“We may have canceled Kanye,” Ms. Clark said, but “that may not mean that it’s universal and uniform.”
Basically, declaring that someone is canceled doesn’t necessitate a change in behavior. Ms. Rimi put it this way: “Are we actually canceling people, or just saying we’re canceling them and we’re still going to support them?”
Kimberly Foster, the founder and editor in chief of For Harriet, has taken aim at the idea more broadly in a video called “We Can’t Cancel Everyone,” in which she points out that isolating people does not undo harm they’ve done.
She said in an interview that it was necessary to differentiate between individuals who said offensive things and the institutions that stripped people of their humanity — the latter being far more destructive.
“Changing culture meaningfully means approaching folks from the standpoint of ‘these harmful ideas you are perpetuating need to go,’” she said. “We’re not going to accept this anymore. But the people themselves can be recovered.”
Which is to say, the canceled can be uncanceled — if they’re willing to do the work. Or hire a good publicist.
Best takeaway?
Kimberly Foster, the founder and editor in chief of For Harriet, has taken aim at the idea more broadly in a video called “We Can’t Cancel Everyone,” in which she points out that isolating people does not undo harm they’ve done.
She said in an interview that it was necessary to differentiate between individuals who said offensive things and the institutions that stripped people of their humanity — the latter being far more destructive.
“Changing culture meaningfully means approaching folks from the standpoint of ‘these harmful ideas you are perpetuating need to go,’” she said. “We’re not going to accept this anymore. But the people themselves can be recovered.”
Here's her full statement:
A few weeks ago, Neelam, a high school senior, was sitting in class at her Catholic school in Chicago. After her teacher left the room, a classmate began playing “Bump N’ Grind,” an R. Kelly song.
Neelam, 17, had recently watched the documentary series “Surviving R. Kelly” with her mother. She said it had been “emotional to take in as a black woman.”
Neelam asked the boy and his cluster of friends to stop playing the track, but he shrugged off the request. “‘It’s just a song,’” she said he replied. “‘We understand he’s in jail and known for being a pedophile, but I still like his music.’”
She was appalled. They were in a class about social justice. They had spent the afternoon talking about Catholicism, the common good and morality. The song continued to play.
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That classmate, who is white, had done things in the past that Neelam described as problematic, like casually using racist slurs — not name-calling — among friends. After class, she decided he was “canceled,” at least to her.
Her decision didn’t stay private; she told a friend that week that she had canceled him. She told her mother too. She said that this meant she would avoid speaking or engaging with him in the future, that she didn’t care to hear what he had to say, because he wouldn’t change his mind and was beyond reason.
“When it comes to cancel culture, it’s a way to take away someone’s power and call out the individual for being problematic in a situation,” Neelam said. “I don’t think it’s being sensitive. I think it’s just having a sense of being observant and aware of what’s going on around you.”
The term “canceled” “sort of spawned from YouTube,” said Ben, a high school junior in Providence, R.I. (Because of their age and the situations involved, The New York Times has granted partial anonymity to some people. We have confirmed details with parents or schoolmates.)
He talked about the YouTuber James Charles, who was canceled by the platform’s beauty community in May after some drama with his mentor, Tati Westbrook, also a YouTuber, and a vitamin entrepreneur. That was a big cancellation, widely covered, that helped popularize the term. Teenagers often bring it up.
Ben, 17, said that people should be held accountable for their actions, whether they’re famous or not, but that canceling someone “takes away the option for them to learn from their mistakes and kind of alienates them.”
His school doesn’t have much bullying, he said, and the word carries a gentler meaning in its hallways, used in passing to tease friends. Often, the joke extends beyond people. One week, after students were debating the safety of e-cigarettes and vaping, some declared that Juul was canceled.
It took some time for L to understand that she had been canceled. She was 15 and had just returned to a school she used to attend. “All the friends I had previously had through middle school completely cut me off,” she said. “Ignored me, blocked me on everything, would not look at me.”
Months went by. Toward the end of sophomore year, she reached out over Instagram to a former friend, asking why people were not talking to her. It was lunchtime; the person she asked was sitting in the cafeteria with lots of people and so they all piled on. It was like an avalanche, L said.
Within a few minutes she got a torrent of direct messages from the former friend on Instagram, relaying what they had said. One said she was a mooch. One said she was annoying and petty. One person said that she had ruined her self-esteem. Another said that L was an emotional leech who was thirsty for validation.
“This put me in a situation where I thought I had done all these things,” L said. “I was bad. I deserved what was happening.”
Two years have passed since then. “You can do something stupid when you’re 15, say one thing and 10 years later that shapes how people perceive you,” she said. “We all do cringey things and make dumb mistakes and whatever. But social media’s existence has brought that into a place where people can take something you did back then and make it who you are now.”
In her junior year, L said, things got better. Still, that rush of messages and that social isolation have left a lasting impact. “I’m very prone to questioning everything I do,” she said. “‘Is this annoying someone?’ ‘Is this upsetting someone?’”
“I have issues with trusting perfectly normal things,” she said. “That sense of me being some sort of monster, terrible person, burden to everyone, has stayed with me to some extent. There’s still this sort of lingering sense of: What if I am?”
Alex is 17, and she hears the word “canceled” every day at her high school outside Atlanta. It can be a joke, but it can also suggest that an offending person won’t be tolerated again. Alex thinks of it as a permanent label. “Now they’ll forever be thought of as that action, not for the person they are,” she said.
“It’s not like you’ll sit away from them at lunch or something,” she said. “It’s just a lingering thought in the back of your mind, a negative connotation.”
During a mock trial practice a couple of weeks before a big competition, the song “Act Up” by City Girls was playing. One of Alex’s teammates, who is of Indian descent, rapped along with the lyrics, which include a racist slur.
The students, who until that point had been chatty because their teacher wasn’t in the room, went silent. “I was the only black person in the room,” Alex said.
Alex and another friend on the team explained to their teammate why he shouldn’t have used that word. “We’re a team, so we can’t have tension exist there,” she said.
He said he understood why they were uncomfortable but that it wouldn’t necessarily prevent him from using it again when singing along. He wouldn’t take it back.
“You’re canceled, sis,” her friend told the teammate. It was partially to lighten the mood, but also partly serious.
“It’s a joke, but still, we understand you have that opinion now and we’re not going to get closer,” Alex said.
Despite his initial tough stance, the teammate didn’t rap the word again, and Alex said that he had remained respectful during practice. The team took ninth and 11th place at the competition.
It was orientation day for freshmen at Sarah Lawrence College, where one new student was unnerved by a social justice group’s presentation. The presenters discussed pronoun use and called on the entering freshmen to “‘battle heteronormativity and cisgender language,’” the student said.
Even if you accidentally misgendered someone, the new students were told, you needed to be either called out or called in. (“Called in” means to be gently led to understand your error; call-outs are more aggressive.) The presenters emphasized that the impact on the person who was misgendered was what mattered, regardless of the intent of the person who had misgendered them.
The freshman thought back to a time when her father had misgendered a friend of hers. Her father had asked her to apologize on his behalf. She did. “‘I only get mad when people intentionally try to misgender me because they feel like they have to correct who I am,’” she recalled her friend saying.
Sarah Lawrence has fewer than 1,500 undergraduates. One upperclassman she became friends with said that she had been canceled in her own freshman year.
But, this upperclassman said, the politics enforced through cancellation don’t always fit neatly into the social dynamics of college.
“I think where it loses me, we’re taking these systems that are applying huge abstract ideas of identity’s role and we’re shrinking it into these interpersonal, one-on-one, liberal arts things,” the upperclassman said.
Among the upperclassman’s friend group now, the idea of cancellation is “basically a joke.” Too many people had been canceled. At a recent party the upperclassman had attended, one guy said, “‘If you haven’t been canceled, you’re canceled.’”
One night during Mike’s freshman year at a New York state college, he and a group of friends were headed to a party downtown. As they were waiting for their Uber, someone cracked a political joke, and then the casual conversation turned confrontational. One of Mike’s friends asked his roommate, D, if he was a Trump supporter.
D had a history of making the group uncomfortable. Mike and their mutual friend Phoebe said that he would make sexist, homophobic and racist remarks in past hangouts.
D said he did support the president — an anomaly in their liberal friend group — and “blew up” at the friend who asked the question. When the friend tried to change the subject, he became more upset. Mike stepped between the two to defuse the situation. “He got in my friend’s face, and that was the last straw,” Mike said.
He tried to cool D down; it didn’t work. D called Mike a homophobic slur, multiple times. The group split up. Mike didn’t return to his dorm that night, staying at a friend’s place instead.
“Even before this, we could tell, if I weren’t roommates with him, we wouldn’t have been friends,” Mike said. “So that was the breaking point for me, him saying that when I was sticking up for him.”
D left an apology note on Mike’s desk, which mostly tried to “justify his actions,” Mike said. “That set in my mind that he didn’t really feel bad about what he did,” he said. “He just felt bad for himself, that he would be looked at in a different light.”
A couple of days later, Phoebe, Mike and D sat down and D repeated the apology. Phoebe and Mike heard him out but said it didn’t clear him of wrongdoing and that he would have to demonstrate that he was different now. Both said that while D appeared sad about losing his friends, tearing up during their discussion, he didn’t show remorse.
Other friends didn’t accept the apology. “We wouldn’t tolerate it anymore, we cut him out of our lives,” Phoebe said.
Thus canceled, D moved from sadness to frustration and anger, Phoebe said. He grew “very bitter,” she said. She noticed that he had unfollowed and blocked the group on Snapchat and other social media a few weeks later.
“He did feel bullied by this whole canceled idea,” she said. “But in this case, no one felt bad doing it, because he didn’t really take responsibility for a lot of the things he said.”
Mike, though, still lives with D. He had signed on to live with him before the ordeal. They don’t speak. D has stopped acknowledging Mike and most everyone from their old group. “I’m definitely not living with him next year,” Mike said.
Phoebe managed to keep things civil. “Every time we see him, I still say hi,” she said. Sometimes, but not always, he nods or says hi back.
What Obama States About Cancel Culture -- and how it is NOT activism
Former President Barack Obama made a rare foray into the cultural conversation this week, objecting to the prevalence of “call-out culture” and “wokeness” during an interview about youth activism at the Obama Foundation summit on Tuesday.
For more than an hour, Mr. Obama sat onstage with the actress Yara Shahidi and several other young leaders from around the world. The conversation touched on “leadership, grass roots change and the power places have to shape our journeys,” the Obama Foundation said, but it was his remarks about young activists that have ricocheted around the internet, mostly receiving praise from a cohort of bipartisan and intergenerational supporters.
“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff,” Mr. Obama said. “You should get over that quickly.”
“The world is messy; there are ambiguities,” he continued. “People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you.”
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Mr. Obama spoke repeatedly of the role of social media in activism specifically, including the idea of what’s become known as “cancel culture,” which is much remarked upon, but still nebulously defined. It tends to refer to behavior that mostly plays out on the internet when someone has said or done something to which others object. That person is then condemned in a flurry of social media posts. Such people are often referred to as “canceled,” a way of saying that many others (and perhaps the places at which they work) are fed up with them and will have no more to do with them.
Mr. Obama talked about conversations he’s had with his daughter Malia, who is a student at Harvard with Ms. Shahidi.
“I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes of: ‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people,’” he said, “and that’s enough.”
“Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb,” he said, “then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, ‘Man, you see how woke I was, I called you out.’”
Then he pretended to sit back and press the remote to turn on a television.
“That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change,” he said. “If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.”
Reminds me of a discussion I had with a co-worker recently...
Coworker holding up pencil: what is this?
ME: A pencil.
Coworker points to erasure: what is this?
Me: An erasure.
Coworker: People make mistakes. We all do. We're human.
The NY Times has a series of fascinating articles on this...
Those People We Tried to Cancel? They are All Hanging Out Together
The term for people who have been thrust out of social or professional circles in this way — either online or in the real world or sometimes both — is “canceled.”
This week, even Barack Obama spoke about online denunciation, personal purity and being “politically woke,” saying, “If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far.”
There are varying degrees of cancellation. Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, Harvey Weinstein and other men have been canceled for serial sexual assault or harassment; non-famous abusers and predatory media executives have been canceled as well.
The merely offensive (Roseanne Barr, Shane Gillis) are somewhere down the scale, adjacent to the provocative or clueless or callous (Dave Chappelle, Scarlett Johansson).
At the bottom end, cancellation consists of some mild, inconsequential criticism. On YouTube, vloggers cancel each other and even themselves with startling regularity, often for petty or invented grievances.
Ms. Herzog became a member of a unique emerging class of people — journalists, academics, opinion writers — canceled for bad, conservative or offensive opinions.
As it happens, cancellation is bringing many of them together.
Here Is the Attention We All Ordered
Alice Dreger, a former Northwestern University professor, estimated she has counseled “about 100” people through their experiences being canceled. In doing so, she has become part of an “informal peer network” that includes two pugnacious writer-personalities: Christina Hoff Sommers, who rose to prominence defending Gamergate and coining “victim feminism,” and Meghan Murphy, who opposed adding gender identity to Canada’s human rights act.
Ms. Herzog had interviewed Ms. Dreger for her piece on trans people. “I told her, ‘You’re going to get slaughtered for this.’ She just laughed,” Ms. Dreger said. “Six months later, she gave me a call.”
“Katie thought what we all thought: The truth will save me. That’s what Galileo thought, too, and he died under house arrest. The same thing has happened to us.”
Ms. Dreger is neither dead nor under house arrest, but she has become a resource for the canceled because of her 2015 book, “Galileo’s Middle Finger,” about when intellectuals are vilified. (In part, it recounts the story of J. Michael Bailey, who endorses a theory called “autogynephilia” as a factor in gender transitions; many trans people say that tying their identity to sexual arousal is offensive.)
Ms. Dreger’s chief concern is ensuring that the canceled person has access to mental health care, she said. The experience of public scorn is psychologically damaging.
“There’s an effect to being constantly told, in public, that you’re wrong and evil,” said Kathleen Stock, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex in England.
Ms. Stock has also received strong criticism for her writings on trans people. (She describes herself as “gender critical.”) She said she is “anathema” in certain philosophy factions.
She has also corresponded with Ms. Herzog and Jesse Singal, another journalist who has been scorned for his writing on trans people, and has developed genuine friendships with like-minded academics. “Some of us have even been on holiday together,” Ms. Stock said.
The Cancellation Media Ecosystem
“I’m an ambulance chaser for the canceled,” joked Jonathan Kay, an editor of Quillette, an online publication that touts itself as a defender of free speech and has emerged as a home for the canceled to plead their cases.
Ms. Stock used Quillette to reassert her views. “I’ve found defending myself in print is the best thing I can do to feel better by myself,” she said.
Mr. Kay clarified that Quillette will not publish just anyone, however. “Being canceled is like autism — it’s a spectrum,” he said. Harvey Weinstein would be a “no” for him.
“We’re much more interested in the opposite end of the spectrum, where you have people who have been accused of things that are much less serious, and don’t nearly approach a criminal level,” Mr. Kay said.
Readers want to hear from the canceled, but the larger motivation is philosophical. Quillette’s editorial point of view is that so-called cancel culture is overly punitive and lacks nuance.
“When I went to law school, in the ’90s, the presumption of innocence was seen as a progressive value,” Mr. Kay said. “Because who is mostly wrongly accused of crime? Racialized minorities. Blacks, Hispanics, the poor. More often than not, it protects marginalized communities. And now the presumption of innocence is seen as a conservative value. And that troubles me.”
Bridget Phetasy hosts the “Walk-Ins Welcome” podcast, which she said “has become the island of misfit toys.” The show has featured people like Andrew Doyle, a British comedian, and Mitchell Sunderland, a freelance writer who was fired from Vice.
“I don’t see myself as someone who’s been canceled as much as someone who’s willing to sit down and associate with the canceled,” Ms. Phetasy said. “I’m an ally of the canceled.”
She is also friends with Art Tavana, who has the dubious distinction of having been maybe-canceled twice. In 2016, he wrote an ode to the sex appeal of the pop musician Sky Ferreira for LA Weekly. (The editor of the article apologized.)
Mr. Tavana’s second cancellation came at Playboy in 2018; he was hired as a conservative columnist. “My three best friends straight up told me, ‘I don’t want to talk to you anymore,’” he said. “One friend, we had known each other since kindergarten.”
Playboy, he said, decided that he was not a good fit for its more progressive look. His ouster spurred a kinship with Ms. Phetasy, a fellow former Playboy columnist.“We both felt like we had been shoved out for not being woke enough,” Mr. Tavana said.
Her podcast has also featured Dave Rubin, who has created a media organization, the Rubin Report, around his cancellation.
“My show has become a hub for misunderstood or canceled people or to-be-canceled people to express themselves honestly,” Mr. Rubin said.
Mr. Rubin began his digital media career in 2013 at The Young Turks, a leftist news organization, but branched out on his own in 2016.
“Suddenly all of these people who were being lambasted in the media came on my show, and we became legitimate friends,” Mr. Rubin said. He did a tour with Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor turned motivational speaker. Mr. Rubin also regularly dines with Peter Thiel, the libertarian venture capitalist, and is friends with Ben Shapiro, who is against abortion and diversity but for Ted Cruz.
On Mr. Rubin’s show, Mr. Shapiro said that organizations should be able to refuse service to same-sex married couples on religious grounds, and that straight couples are better parents than gay couples. (Mr. Rubin lives in Los Angeles with his husband.)
Obviously, Mr. Rubin declined to cancel Mr. Shapiro. “We can remain friends and agree to disagree,” Mr. Rubin said. “I believe in the long game: If you show people respect, then some of these guys who are religiously against gay marriage, they’ll probably come around because they’ve met some decent gay men.”
This association with right-wing figures has cost Mr. Rubin several friendships, including with people who attended his wedding. Mr. Rubin says he is happier being canceled. “Woke progressives are a pretty miserable bunch,” he said. “Try joking with that group.”
The Intellectual Gray Area
Meghan Murphy and Cathy Young used to square off regularly on Twitter. “She wrote some really nasty things about me,” Ms. Young said.
Ms. Murphy called Ms. Young a “virulent anti-feminist” and an apologist for men’s rights activists.
But they buried the hatchet at, yes, a Quillette party in Toronto. “She basically said that she really came to understand the importance of letting people have their own opinions, even if some people consider them offensive,” Ms. Young said.
That Quillette party is also where Ms. Murphy met Jamie Kilstein, a comedian who was fired from a progressive radio show after a number of women accused him of sexually predatory and emotionally abusive behavior. “We hated each other on Twitter,” Ms. Murphy said. “And he was at the Quillette party, and I said, ‘Hey!’ And he was like, ‘Hey!’”
Mr. Singal also connected with Mr. Kilstein. “I probably would have been too scared to get breakfast with Kilstein before I dealt with this,” Mr. Singal said.
Mr. Singal has written frequently on trans people in ways that have upset vocal members of that community. His stature has only grown, including on Twitter, where he mocks woke culture and identity politics. He is one of many who simultaneously talk about their cancellation experience while also noting that they also haven’t really been canceled.
“I have lost Twitter friends, but I haven’t lost real-life friends,” he said. “My friends are normies.”
On Oct. 28, completing some kind of circle, he appeared on Quillette’s podcast, discussing his experience. (He also appeared on the podcast in January.)
“The experience of seeing an insane caricature of yourself pop up online makes you more sympathetic to anyone else who has been through this thing,” he said.
Mr. Singal and Ms. Murphy may be case studies for people who don’t believe “cancel culture” is real, or effective. Twitter-based outrage hasn’t had a lasting, adverse effect on their careers or social lives. It has become a central part of their online personas.
For Ms. Murphy, getting canceled has brought her into contact with people she once considered her “political enemies.”
She was banned from Twitter for “targeted misgendering” and then sued Twitter over the decision. (She lost the suit but said she is currently in the appeal process.) While she thought it would hurt her writing career, she said the opposite occurred. “People tried to cancel me, and I was un-cancelable,” Ms. Murphy said. “It backfired, and I gained a bigger profile.”
She was defended by “people I never would have considered and talked to before — anti-feminists, men who think feminism is stupid and it’s about hating men,” Ms. Murphy said. Mr. Shapiro reached out to her to offer his support.
The Canceled-Adjacent Problematic Club
In May 2016, Mandy Stadtmiller wrote a first-person essay about her husband being a supporter of Donald Trump. She was inundated with messages urging her to divorce him. She lost a couple of “close” friends. She grew increasingly disillusioned from the New York media clique she was once eager to join.
“It was crazy-making to have a lot of people telling me, ‘You’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong,’” Ms. Stadtmiller said.
She also experienced a “chill in work,” she said. “Some of the top decision makers at different media outlets very much made it clear they were not as excited to use me as they once had been,” she said.
“There’s never been a ‘Mandy Stadtmiller is canceled’ party,” she said. “I look at it as being — I don’t know what the word is. ‘Canceled adjacent,’ maybe.”
She also found solace in speaking with Ms. Herzog and Mr. Sunderland, whom she had known for a while. But the closest relationship Ms. Stadtmiller formed was with Keri Smith, a self-identified former “social justice warrior.”
Ms. Smith was a leftist comedy producer. She was an executive producer of “Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell,” which is what she calls “the first SJW late night show.” (“SJW” stands for “social justice warriors.”)
Then she wrote an essay for Medium: “On Leaving the SJW Cult and Finding Myself.”
Ms. Stadtmiller traveled to stay with Ms. Smith for a month, in her home north of Austin, Texas. “I actually helped her turn it into an Airbnb!” Ms. Stadtmiller said. “I need friends like I need oxygen. So in reaching out to people who wouldn’t start screaming at me because I was Eva Braun or something, I developed richer, more real friendships.”
Who Runs the Culture?
The social cost of associating with the canceled can be greater than being canceled, said Andrew Doyle, the British comic. People remain silent.
Mr. Doyle runs a parody Twitter account about identity politics and cancel culture. He said his work has been described as “racist” and “misogynist.” (“I’ve had one friend literally scream at me in the pub,” he said.)
He reached out to Lisa Hardcastle when her similar Twitter account was suspended in 2018.
Now they, too, are friends, and attend shows at a comedy club Mr. Doyle founded, where the operating ethos is “no self-censorship.”
“In any witch hunt, the people who get the worst treatment are the ones who try to defend the witches and not the witches themselves,” he said. “Anyone who’s read ‘The Crucible’ knows that.”
Cancellation does present a question about power, and who has it.
“The biggest problem we have as a culture is that we can’t define who the establishment is,” Mr. Tavana said. “Is the establishment the woke media people who own 99 percent of the keyboards in the country, or is it the old, canceled guys in media? Who’s the punk rock band and who’s the corporate rock band?”
Mr. Rubin imagines a near future where everyone is canceled for 15 minutes.
“The woke progressives are going to implode, and pretty soon they’ll destroy everything,” he said. “It’s just a matter of how much will they take down with them. They’re going to cancel Barack Obama one day, because Obama ran against gay marriage at one time.”
Mr. Shapiro said, “Our culture is dying because we have no capacity for forgiveness or discussion.”
That Which Does Not Kill Them
“There have been attempts to cancel me, but I cannot be canceled, because I refuse to be canceled,” Ms. Herzog said
“I’ve certainly lost a lot of friends and had a lot of abuse online and damage to my reputation and livelihood,” Mr. Doyle said, “but that’s not the same thing as being canceled. I’m still able to do the work I want to do. If you retreat away, it makes you the victim. We don’t want to be considered victims.”
“They can’t cancel you if you don’t care,” Ms. Phetasy said.
“My cancellation, if you want to call it that, has been the greatest thing to ever happen to me,” Mr. Rubin said.
“SJWs don’t have friends, they have allies,” Ms. Smith said. “And your allies leave as soon as you’re not speaking the ideology anymore.”
Ms. Murphy describes her cancellation as “a gift.”
As Ms. Herzog has begun to advise other people through their cancellations, her advice to them is to embrace being canceled.
“It’s deeply painful, but it can be positive in many ways,” she said. “Before this happened, I was much more dogmatic, I was more of a purist. I’m smarter, I’m more skeptical, I’m more empathetic, and I’m much less quick to judge than I was before. And I’m much less sure of my own correctness.”
“Which is why I hope everyone is canceled,” she said.
Almost Everyone Worth Knowing Has Been Cancelled By Someone
Almost everyone worth knowing has been canceled by someone.
Bill Gates is canceled. Gwen Stefani and Erykah Badu are canceled. Despite his relatively strong play in the World Cup, Cristiano Ronaldo has been canceled. Taylor Swift is canceled and Common is canceled and, Wednesday, Antoni Porowski, a “Queer Eye” fan favorite was also canceled. Needless to say, Kanye West is canceled, too.
Also canceled: concepts! 2018 is “officially, extremely canceled,” and so is love. And, inevitably, saying something “is canceled” is also canceled.
In these cases, the word refers to total disinvestment in something (anything), and this usage can be traced back several years. But in the last few months, it’s been everywhere. The most popular definition of the concept on Urban Dictionary was posted in March and four of the nine definitions listed were added in just the last two years.
There’s a hierarchy to being canceled: Celebrities who say things many people find unacceptable, like Kanye, who suggested slavery was a choice, or Shania Twain, who said she would have voted for President Trump were she not a Canadian person, have been canceled en masse.
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In a recent interview with The New York Times, Kanye fretted extensively about being canceled, using some form of the word seven separate times. “I’m canceled. I’m canceled because I didn’t cancel Trump,” he said.
But not all cancellations are the result of transgressing fans’ expectations. Sometimes they happen for no stated reason. All it takes for someone to be canceled is for someone else to announce, via social media, that they are. And so even the seemingly blameless — Yara Shahidi, Rowan Blanchard, Chris Evans, etc. — have been canceled. Lena Waithe is one of few celebrities who thus far seems to have avoided cancellation, but perhaps it is imminent.
What Does It Mean to Be Canceled?
“To me, it’s ultimately an expression of agency,” said Meredith Clark, a professor at the University of Virginia’s department of media studies. “To a certain extent: I really do think of it like a breakup and a taking back of one’s power.” Canceling, she said, is an act of withdrawing from someone whose expression — whether political, artistic or otherwise — was once welcome or at least tolerated, but no longer is.
“It’s a cultural boycott,” said Lisa Nakamura, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies the intersection of digital media and race, gender and sexuality. “It’s an agreement not to amplify, signal boost, give money to. People talk about the attention economy — when you deprive someone of your attention, you’re depriving them of a livelihood.”
Who Can Be Canceled?
If you announce that someone is canceled, they’re canceled. But it gets more complicated.
Some people are more widely recognized as being canceled than others, and cancellation frequently comes in a groundswell as a response to a person’s comments or actions. Student Edge, an Australian website with articles written by high school and college students, announced in January that Twitter users “had decided to cancel Cardi B” after she defended the rapper Offset, her husband, for rapping that he “cannot vibe with queers.”
Ms. Clark said that only those whose power is, for the most part, predicated on the attention economy are susceptible to cancellation. Which means that political figures and business leaders are harder to cancel — even rhetorically — because the threat only goes so far.
“A political figure has the ability to weigh in on something beyond discourse,” she said. “The best you can do with canceling someone is cutting off attention, your time and your money. Canceling is not enough of a disruptive practice to take a politician out of office.”
Because cancellation takes place online, it can have a pan-continental effect. Aisha Rimi, who works at the London School of Economics and has blogged about cancel culture, said: “When someone’s canceled on black American Twitter, they tend to be canceled on black U.K. Twitter.”
Why Is Everyone Getting Canceled Now?
In a subscription-heavy era where everything is on-demand, and celebrities are packaged and sold as commodities, the language of cancellation is close at hand. The usage is widely understood to have come from Black Twitter, the loose networks of black users active on the site.
An early example of the term’s rise: In a 2016 episode of the web series “Joanne the Scammer,” the title character struggles to use an espresso machine, then declares the entire enterprise to be canceled. Jason Richards, who wrote the episode, said it came from something that Branden Miller, who created Joanne, had said online several times.
“I think the humor of it comes from how inhumane it is,” Mr. Richards said. “To cancel a human is just a funny way of putting it. Joanne is someone who scams people, and the word canceled seems of that world, of reservations being canceled and credit cards being canceled.”
“It speaks to a lifestyle of commodity, consumerism and capitalism, of transactions being canceled,” he said. “It’s a very transactional word.”
Ms. Nakamura said that cancel culture was born of a desire for control. People have limited power over what is presented to them on social media platforms, which are notorious for being poorly regulated. When YouTube refused to defenestrate Logan Paul after he posted a deeply insensitive video in December, she said, individuals were compelled to take matters into their own hands, doing the work of deplatforming him instead of waiting on deliverance from YouTube.
“Socially irredeemable things are said on platforms all the time,” Ms. Nakamura said. Cancellation creates “a culture of accountability which is not centralized and is haphazard, but needed to come into being.”
Is Anyone Ever Really Canceled?
Celebrities who are also television personalities — like Bill O’Reilly, Charlie Rose and Roseanne Barr — have had their shows quite literally canceled. That is due, in some part, to public pressure.
But 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.
“We may have canceled Kanye,” Ms. Clark said, but “that may not mean that it’s universal and uniform.”
Basically, declaring that someone is canceled doesn’t necessitate a change in behavior. Ms. Rimi put it this way: “Are we actually canceling people, or just saying we’re canceling them and we’re still going to support them?”
Kimberly Foster, the founder and editor in chief of For Harriet, has taken aim at the idea more broadly in a video called “We Can’t Cancel Everyone,” in which she points out that isolating people does not undo harm they’ve done.
She said in an interview that it was necessary to differentiate between individuals who said offensive things and the institutions that stripped people of their humanity — the latter being far more destructive.
“Changing culture meaningfully means approaching folks from the standpoint of ‘these harmful ideas you are perpetuating need to go,’” she said. “We’re not going to accept this anymore. But the people themselves can be recovered.”
Which is to say, the canceled can be uncanceled — if they’re willing to do the work. Or hire a good publicist.
Best takeaway?
Kimberly Foster, the founder and editor in chief of For Harriet, has taken aim at the idea more broadly in a video called “We Can’t Cancel Everyone,” in which she points out that isolating people does not undo harm they’ve done.
She said in an interview that it was necessary to differentiate between individuals who said offensive things and the institutions that stripped people of their humanity — the latter being far more destructive.
“Changing culture meaningfully means approaching folks from the standpoint of ‘these harmful ideas you are perpetuating need to go,’” she said. “We’re not going to accept this anymore. But the people themselves can be recovered.”
Here's her full statement:
no subject
Date: 2019-11-04 02:43 pm (UTC)But the Cancel Movement didn't come from nowhere. It's a reaction to decades, centuries of cancellation by people in power, and their refusal to listen--their continued refusal to listen--to the opinions of people not like them. You want to vote? I'm sorry, you're not the right color or live in the right area. You're cancelled. You want equal pay or the right to control your own body? Sorry, that's not your place sweetheart. You're cancelled. You want to live in MY neighborhood? Hell no. You are cancelled.
Try an experiment. Introduce a nice, friendly white couple to a social circle of holy rollers. Then let the husband start talking about how God is a lie, and humanist principles are the way to run a sane world. See how long the "let's listen to different points of view" line holds up. That said.. .
That said...
There IS a danger in the cancel movement, just as Obama said. The graying of standing up for principles into intolerance. The desire for purity, despite eons of history telling us that the quest for ideological purity almost always ends in blood. It's a fine line, but it must be maintained if any progress is going to be made at all.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-04 04:42 pm (UTC)But. It's not effective. All it does is alienate and isolate and cause rage to build, and ignorance to build.
All they are doing is making the situation worse.
I think Obama and Kimberly are right -- its not effective activism. Eye for an eye, foot for a foot doesn't work in 2019 like it did in 4000 BC or in the Wild West for that matter.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-04 05:17 pm (UTC)How do you handle someone like Brent?
Do you feed into his ego and trick him with a behaviorist approach of positive reinforcement? Do you smile weakly and swallow your anger to remain civil, like Tahani? Do you shut him down--cancel him--like Simone? Or do you try to wear him down, inch by inch, like Michael?
I liked that the episode was honest with the audience in that NONE of these approaches work, because the Brents of the world never think they're wrong. Michael's is probably the best, but the incremental approach takes time, and time is the one thing Team Cockroach does not have.
But that's part of the message. Through all four seasons, Schur and Co. have been telling us the key is to keep trying, because the alternative--sinking into hopelessness--is worse. (It leads to peep chili, and nobody wants that...)
Be honest and keep the lines of communication open. Is it easy? No. But, as I said, what's the alternative?
no subject
Date: 2019-11-04 06:28 pm (UTC)The child psychiatrist decides to step it up a notch. He tells the little girl that "expert" level of the game is to win without anyone knowing they lost. He asks her if she thinks the goal is to win, and to always have a loser -- she says, yep, pretty much that's how everything works. So he says at the top level, you need to win without anyone knowing they lost. Without hurting or insulting them in any way, in fact you have to find a way to win your brother's phone while making everyone feel good about themselves, and not realize they lost, not feel pain, or anything, even if you do.
The little plays this game, and is delighted when she gets her brother's phone.
The social worker tells the psychiatrist, but there will always be something lacking in her, she'll never feel empathy. And the child psychiatrist basically states, yes, but we'll have to be her empathy for her. Her moral compass, find ways...to manipulate her to be good.
The only other alternative was to put the girl in an "in-patient" psychiatric facility run by correctional services for the rest of her life. (She was 10 years of age, if that.) Or...kill her, which was never mentioned.
It's not a new concept and sort of goes back to the whole "turn the other cheek" concept. The easy path would be to put the little girl in an asylum or to just kill her, the hard path is to find a way to help her live with others without posting a danger to them or herself.
Anyway, I think we agree. Even if we don't agree on the Good Place. Like I said, the humor irritates me.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-05 01:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-05 02:59 am (UTC)