A cancelled thread

[hitmouse]

For some context, some posts from over on the Lineker thread:

It has happened yes. But the bigger picture is people being sacked for centuries for trade union activism, having the 'wrong' religion, wrong sexuality, wrong gender, through employer's blacklists etc etc. Whilst liberal politics and identity politics have been implicated in cancelling and even grassing, it's wrong to separate that out from the massively more significant issue of the powerful, the right and employers doing the 'cancelling'.

I’m not sure I’m doing that tbh. The difference is workers getting other workers sacked over their online opinions. It’s worth talking about that even though we know the bosses do the same. It’s a collaboration with bosses to use boss power against someone you simply disagree with. Worse than scabbing really.

I agree with you - of course - about workers collaborating with bosses to get people sacked. It's just that debates about 'cancel culture' always seem to become debates about social media, maybe intersectionality and other specific things, in the context of the 'culture wars' (yuk).. I just think that all those issues about using someone's beliefs or identities as a means of shutting them up or sacking them need to be put back into that deeper context. And when you do this, it's the right and the powerful who have been doing it. In fact they've often been able to do on the quiet, using the mechanisms of power they have access to and haven't always needed a public mobilisation.

Anyway I'm both conflating a few issues and digressing.

I think that's something fundamentally different from 'cancel culture' which, inasmuch as it's actually a thing, is usually an attempt to hold public figures accountable for statements made in public, often affecting people they have direct authority over.

Which is why I said 'inasmuch as it's actually a thing'. It's just a daft phrase that attempts to label legitimate criticism/protest as some systemic conspiracy against people with dodgy views. We could have a thread on it I suppose.

As it happens, today I happened to stumble on this piece by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which is excellent imo:

IT IS OBSCENE: A TRUE REFLECTION IN THREE PARTS - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

PART ONE When you are a public figure, people will write and say false things about you. It comes with the territory. Many of those things you brush aside. Many you ignore. The people close to you advise you that silence is best. And it...

www.chimamanda.com

In certain young people today like these two from my writing workshop, I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.

I find it obscene.

There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class.

People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’

People who do not recognize that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy – sophistication in this case being a showing-off of how au fait they are on the current version of ideological orthodoxy.

People who wield the words ‘violence’ and ‘weaponize’ like tarnished pitchforks. People who depend on obfuscation, who have no compassion for anybody genuinely curious or confused. Ask them a question and you are told that the answer is to repeat a mantra. Ask again for clarity and be accused of violence. (How ironic, speaking of violence, that it is one of these two who encouraged Twitter followers to pick up machetes and attack me.)

And so we have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow.

And, you know, I never miss an opportunity to bang on about how twitter and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race, so thought might as well start a thread. Obv pure free speech has always been a liberal fantasy and there's always been attempts to enforce the boundaries of what speech is acceptable, including attempts from the left to discourage bigoted and hateful speech, but I also reckon the current moment has new features that are worth thinking about.
I could go on about this for ages, but my basic perspective is informed by how I think about anarchism and antifascism: I don't think that state violence can solve social problems, so I don't call for state bans on far-right groups, if a nazi goes to prison that may be funny but it's not something I view as a serious political victory, and so on, cos ultimately it's just strengthening another social force that's also hostile to liberation. I think that there's a serious case to be made that moral panics and outrages on the Musk website or the Zuckerberg websites are also "using the master's tools", as it were.
Not super interested in using this thread to litigate the rights and wrongs of specific people's cases, although I suppose that may inevitably come up, and definitely not really interested in hearing about whatever daft shit GBNews or The Mail or whoever are on about. It could well be that the term "cancel culture" is too tainted to be useful, but then again people have lots of confused ideas about what "class" or "communism" mean as well.
A few things that might be interesting starting points for a more productive conversation:

Hot Allostatic Load

Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain. Build insi…

thenewinquiry.com

Transcript of "Canceling" — ContraPoints (transcript of this very very long youtube video)

unthinkable thoughts: call out culture in the age of covid-19 – adrienne maree brown

adriennemareebrown.net

I think everyone's probably aware that internet outrage and mobbing are things that exist, but fwiw a few examples that came to mind are:

The Strawman of the Teenage Girl

Yesterday, New York Times bestselling authors Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult were among those to tweet outsized outrage that a single recent college graduate expressed distaste for author Sarah Dessen’s YA novels in a local news item out of Aberdeen, South Dakota about the selection process...

jezebel.com

A poetry magazine parted with an editor after she tweeted that the ‘general population has no interest in what we do’ (although tbf the editor in that story was explicitly clear that she didn't see herself as having been cancelled)

 

[Ax^]

Hitmouse not having a go but break that post up a bit

its information overload and to many links

 

[hitmouse]

Fair enough, being concise is not my strong point!

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

I'd definitely say the phrase cancel culture itself is a bit useless - it's about an inch from 'woke' isn't it and trotted out by the sort of toxic right wing hypocrites who'll turn round and do the exact stuff they're moaning about without a moments hesitation given the opportunity.

I think most people would recognise though there's some truth in the depiction of a lot of left wing culture and particularly on social media involving a lot of pretty unpleasant behaviour and that often involves picking over of people's words and histories to find one thing that can be used to discredit and shout them down (and I'd dispute the idea that this is linked to ID politics particularly). I mentioned Mark Fisher's Exiting the Vampire Castle the other day in the context of Russell Brand and I think although I thought at the time Brand was an odd choice to use to make the point, and that's definitely the case with hindsight, a lot of what he says in there is pretty accurate isn't it.

I think maybe there's a point to be made about applying this to people who are ostensibly on your side as against those who definitely aren't. I think who gets to speak and be heard is inevitably going to be contested and if, say, Toby Young feels cancelled because he can't talk about Eugenics freely, then good. The effect of this stuff on the first group though is to continually reduce the people who are ok, who you're prepared to listen to. It doesn't get anywhere helpful at all. Obviously there's no definite clear line there (some people will view some strains of conspiracy theorist as being essentially on the same side for example while I'd be in favour of kicking them as hard as possible) but it should be possible to back off from some of this stuff a bit at least.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Social media has changed the way people grow up. The psychologist Sherry Turkle puts it well when she says that we have lost the space to get stuff wrong when we're young. Whatever stupid thing we thought when we were 16 is now immortalised on the web to be picked over by others years later, by which point we may very well have become a very different person with very different views. We've lost the freedom to reimagine and reinvent ourselves as we grow up.

We need to be forgiving of stupid shit people may have said on social media years ago when they were still teenagers. Allow them to move on.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Regarding Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I think that piece is very good. She herself got into social media trouble for some pretty mild comments in support of JK Rowling over trans issues. Given that hers is an important voice for LGBT rights in a part of the world that desperately needs such voices, we need to be very careful here that a quest for the ideological purity that she speaks of doesn't end up squashing the wrong people.

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

Social media has changed the way people grow up. The psychologist Sherry Turkle puts it well when she says that we have lost the space to get stuff wrong when we're young. Whatever stupid thing we thought when we were 16 is now immortalised on the web to be picked over by others years later, by which point we may very well have become a very different person with very different views. We've lost the freedom to reimagine and reinvent ourselves as we grow up.

We need to be forgiving of stupid shit people may have said on social media years ago when they were still teenagers. Allow them to move on.

I think this is true even in the much shorter term. I don't think you'd need to go back very far at all for most of us to find something which maybe wasn't well thought through or we've since reconsidered. You shouldn't need to have to dig in on everything you've ever said should you.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I think this is true even in the much shorter term. I don't think you'd need to go back very far at all for most of us to find something which maybe wasn't well thought through or we've since reconsidered. You shouldn't need to have to dig in on everything you've ever said should you.

Yeah, this is in play in the timeframe of many of us on here. I'm the anti-pogofish in this regard. If you want to comment on a subject and the only thread you can find is ten years old, don't resurrect it. Start a new one.

 

[smokedout]

As it happens, today I happened to stumble on this piece by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which is excellent imo:

IT IS OBSCENE: A TRUE REFLECTION IN THREE PARTS - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

PART ONE When you are a public figure, people will write and say false things about you. It comes with the territory. Many of those things you brush aside. Many you ignore. The people close to you advise you that silence is best. And it...

www.chimamanda.com

There's two sides to this. I don't really see what the difference is between what her former student did and what Adichie does in this post, except one clearly has more power and a bigger platform. There seem to be a lot of people decrying cancel culture who are quite happy to use it as a weapon themselves when they feel slighted by someone they consider lesser than them.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

There's two sides to this. I don't really see what the difference is between what her former student did and what Adichie does in this post, except one clearly has more power and a bigger platform. There seem to be a lot of people decrying cancel culture who are quite happy to use it as a weapon themselves when they feel slighted by someone they consider lesser than them.

There is one big difference, which is that in this post Adichie is replying to an insult. She didn't start it. Hell, according to the blog, she didn't even voice her negative criticisms of the other person's novel in public before the other person turned on her.

For me, Adichie is a good example to hold up of what I understand to be 'cancel culture'. A novelist and public intellectual who has a long history of supporting minority rights of all kinds in a part of the world that needs voices like hers, is she really a person who people think should be disinvited from events? This isn't about whether or not you agree with her views on trans women. It's about whether or not her views could be considered so beyond the pale that she deserves to be de-platformed. Surely the answer to that second part is a very clear 'no'.

 

[smokedout]

There is one big difference, which is that in this post Adichie is replying to an insult. She didn't start it. Hell, according to the blog, she didn't even voice her negative criticisms of the other person's novel in public before the other person turned on her.

For me, Adichie is a good example to hold up of what I understand to be 'cancel culture'. A novelist and public intellectual who has a long history of supporting minority rights of all kinds in a part of the world that needs voices like hers, is she really a person who people think should be disinvited from events? This isn't about whether or not you agree with her views on trans women. It's about whether or not her views could be considered so beyond the pale that she deserves to be de-platformed. Surely the answer to that second part is a very clear 'no'.

She is responding to a criticism not necessarily an insult. And releasing private correspondence and making snide personal remarks on the behaviour of a former student in her class is way over the top. She sounds furious, they both do, isn't this more an example of a public spat than cancel culture? The kind of thing that was once mediated through the press but now takes place more directly on blogs and social media. A kind of literary Blur vs Oasis for the internet age. Or in this case Blur vs some local pub band with a twitter feed. It always seems to be the more powerful who get to claim to be victims in these rows.

But has she been deplatformed? She was named one of the top 100 women of the year by the BBC in 2021. Her last book was well reviewed in the mainstream press. She has been awarded a number of honoury degrees since her comments on trans people and appeared on the front cover of Vogue. She seems to be doing rather well for someone who has been cancelled. She has faced heavy criticism from some people, but isn't that the nature of being a famous person with opinions?

I don't know if she's been prevented from speaking anywhere but no-one is entitled to a platform, if people don't like her views then they might not want to host her, that doesn't seem unreasonable. I'd say she's a good example of someone who hasn't been cancelled, she has been criticised, perhaps unfairly in her eyes, and perhaps very unpleasantly by some, but she seems quite prepared to give as good as she gets, as do some of her online supporters who can be just as vicious as her denouncers.

 

[hitmouse]

There's two sides to this. I don't really see what the difference is between what her former student did and what Adichie does in this post, except one clearly has more power and a bigger platform. There seem to be a lot of people decrying cancel culture who are quite happy to use it as a weapon themselves when they feel slighted by someone they consider lesser than them.

I think there's one pretty direct and obvious difference, which is that CNA's critic named her directly, whereas I still have no idea who CNA's former student is beyond someone who used to study with CNA. I suppose if I knew more about Nigerian literature then I might well be able to work out who they are, but as it is I've got no idea. At one point in my life I would've considered it cowardly and said that you should name specific people you disagree with, but as it is I now tend to think that it's a useful way of disagreeing with an idea or way of behaving, rather than a particular person.
Fully agree that the thing can be used to punch down, that was sort of the point of mentioning the YA controversy, but then that's the question, if there's people who are hypocrites for criticising the tool while also using it, are they wrong for criticising the tool or are they wrong for using it?

 

[smokedout]

I think there's one pretty direct and obvious difference, which is that CNA's critic named her directly, whereas I still have no idea who CNA's former student is beyond someone who used to study with CNA. I suppose if I knew more about Nigerian literature then I might well be able to work out who they are, but as it is I've got no idea. At one point in my life I would've considered it cowardly and said that you should name specific people you disagree with, but as it is I now tend to think that it's a useful way of disagreeing with an idea or way of behaving, rather than a particular person.
Fully agree that the thing can be used to punch down, that was sort of the point of mentioning the YA controversy, but then that's the question, if there's people who are hypocrites for criticising the tool while also using it, are they wrong for criticising the tool or are they wrong for using it?

For those who had been following the criticism of Adichie it was pretty obvious who she was referring to so the fact she didn't name them in what amounts to a character assassination of both is pretty irrevelent. And note she doesn't address at all the criticisms they made at all but instead embarks on a personal attack based on private correspondence. It's also perhaps worth mentioning that the first person she discusses was subsequently bullied off twitter by her supporters.

Grave Lavery makes a good point here which is that to be cancelled, or claim to have been cancelled, already implies a privilege - you have to have something to lose. If you have no platform or are not high profile then you might get bullied off social media, get doxed, be subject to misogynist or other bigoted abuse, maybe even get in trouble at work and it will all be invisible. This concerns me a lot more than some celebrity or high profile individual using cancel culture as a weapon against their detractors. There are real problems with how social media is used that are worthy of discussion, but some best selling author living a life of luxury whining about being cancelled because someone criticised them and their fragile egos couldn't cope doesn't elicit much sympathy from me. So I guess to answer your last point it's about power, who has it and how do they wield it.

 

[Cid]

Adichie certainly wasn't prevented from speaking about cancel culture in her opening for the 2022 BBC centenary Reith lectures. (transcript/podcast available below)

BBC Radio 4 - The Reith Lectures, The Four Freedoms, 1. Freedom of Speech

Best-selling author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's BBC Reith Lecture on freedom of speech.

www.bbc.co.uk

I found it contradictory and sometimes dishonest. To be fair she only got one lecture, so necessarily brief, but even so. I shall use it as a starting point for some thoughts.

We would not expect this whispering [talking about politics under an oppressive regime] in a democracy. Freedom of expression is after all, the bedrock of open societies. But there are many people in Western democracies today who will not speak loudly about issues they care about because they are afraid of what I will call, “social censure,” vicious retaliation, not from the government, but from other citizens.

'When I read something scientifically false, such as that drinking urine cures cancer, or something gratuitously hurtful to human dignity, such as that gay people should be imprisoned for being gay, I desperately long to banish such ideas from the world. Yet I resist advocating censorship. I take this position as much for reasons of principle as for practicality.

Where is the dividing line here? Why is a virulently homophobic book acceptable, but someone criticising another person on twitter not? Is it that one work is published and one isn't? Why is 'social censure' something other than the effects of having greater access to the tools of communication, and the ability to engage in free speech? This is always the problem with arguments on free speech - the boundaries never have any objective basis (they can't), but people will always argue that their place on that spectrum is the logical one (I certainly have*).

The expression, ‘the answer to bad speech is more speech,’ in its beguiling simplicity, also fails to consider a central motif, which is power. Who has access? Who is in a position to answer bad speech with more speech? In arguing for the freedom of speech, one must consider all the limitations placed by unequal power relations, such as a mainstream press owned by fewer and fewer wealthy people, which naturally excludes multiple voices.

She is addressing a group of people who come from that media, in one of its most prestigious expressions of social power. She has access. Her interlocutors do not (at least not to the same extent), and so they take to the modern form of the letter, pamphlet, zine. She also says that 'the solution to this threat can only be collective action'. What form does collective action take in the modern world? What medium and techniques do people use when 'the answer to bad speech is more speech'?

Dishonesty I think:

An American student once accosted me at a book reading. “Why,” she asked angrily, “Had I said something in an interview?” I told her that what I had said was the truth, and she agreed that it was and then asked, “But why should we say it, even if it’s true?” At first, I was astonished at the absurdity of the question, then I realised what she meant. It didn’t matter what I actually believed. I should not have said it because it did not align with my political tribe. I had desecrated the prevailing orthodoxy..

Assuming we're talking about the 'trans women are trans women' comment, this is just an argument on the importance of context. Like it or not publicly saying 'trans women are trans women' (as an answer to the question 'are trans women women?') has more meaning that just noting a thing that is technically true. Saying that the student simply saw 'desecration of orthodoxy' is nonsense. Sure, take the point of view - freedom of speech and all that - but don't pretend it doesn't say something about your own position in relation to that issue.

And finally when she cites censorship:

My practical reason, we could also call it my selfish reason, is that I fear the weapon I advocate to be used against someone else might one day be used against me. What today is considered benign could very well become offensive tomorrow, because the suppression of speech is not so much about the speech itself, as it is the person who censors. American high school boards are today engaged in a frenzy of book banning, and the process seems arbitrary. Books that have been used in school curriculums for years with no complaints have suddenly been banned in some states, and I understand that one of my novels is in this august group.

I find this weird. I mean it's true... But it has very little to do with the rest of her talk; it's not 'social censure', it's your good old fashioned full on censorship. Why mention it here? Or, more to the point, why not make it the subject of you speech? It's effects are very likely far more dangerous and far reaching than your former student calling you out on twitter. I think this felt uncomfortable because the para after next is:

And so, I would say, do not ban them, answer them. In this age of mounting disinformation all over the world, when it is easy to dress up a lie so nicely that it starts to take on the glow of truth, the solution is not to hide the lie but to expose it, and scrub from it, its false glow. When we censor the purveyors of bad ideas, we risk making them martyrs, and the battle with a martyr can never be won.

It seems as if she's addressing the same group of people. Almost all the actual censorship at the moment is coming from the far right... The smattering of trigger warnings and edited language pales in comparison. Earlier in the talk she criticises 'sensitivity readers', and it's hard not to link back to that... Her arguments around that probably have more merit (in that having to overthink expression can lead to self-censorship - *and there you see my dividing line), but I think she just goes off down the wrong track from that.

Her focus throughout is on the importance of literature and (in spite of my off-hand comment to magnus, for which I am to be cancelled) I do think there are complexities here. I'm a designer and I have pretty deep problems with ideas around cultural appropriation; in brief that you kind of need to be able to take inspiration freely for any form of creativity, or it all dies (and often we look outside our own immediate social background because that's quite stifling). But even then the arguments around that have taught me an enormous amount, have helped me appreciate the effect my actions can have. I feel reasonably confident that I could justify the work that I do (*and again), or intend to do (not that I have that kind of profile, but you get the idea). Of course someone's still going to be pissed off, and there are very real risks around doxxing etc. But that has more to do with the way communication works today, and I don't think there's any retreat from that - just attempts to moderate it. I think a lot of content creators do realise this; it has become almost a mantra to say 'I'm going to shit on this person, but for god's sake people, don't harass them'. Being flippant a bit of course, but the kids (and to some extent us) do need to find a way of treading this line, and perhaps that will part of it.

Bah, as I said on that other thread 'I need less arguing on the internet' and I've probably already spent a few hours on this and not done the subject justice (either Adichie or cancel culture, which we haven't really discussed) at all.

Actually will finish up by saying that are clearly some extremely harmful forms of social media pile-on. That's undeniable... And the language around this being quasi religious, which Adichie draws on heavily, is relevant there. But it takes a lot to unpick that from what is justifiable criticism (iirc contrapoints does a good job, but cba to rewatch). And to what extent that's the same thing as e.g trying to get Jordan Peterson fired (it took until 2021 for him to resign incidentally) is... unclear.

Ah fuck, was also going to mention that the media (or indeed assorted youtubers) don't help by amplifying and feeding off 'the drama'.

 

[Cid]

Ahem, probably won't contribute much more to this thread, but felt I had to give a bit more nuance since I was so horribly and unfairly called out

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Assuming we're talking about the 'trans women are trans women' comment, this is just an argument on the importance of context. Like it or not publicly saying 'trans women are trans women' (as an answer to the question 'are trans women women?') has more meaning that just noting a thing that is technically true. Saying that the student simply saw 'desecration of orthodoxy' is nonsense. Sure, take the point of view - freedom of speech and all that - but don't pretend it doesn't say something about your own position in relation to that issue.

The question itself is a trap. How was she supposed to answer it?

Sorry, I know you wanted to leave the thread, but there isn't any answer to that question that doesn't nail you to one mast or another, such is the toxicity of debates around such issues. I can well believe that she thought that her answer might defuse the incendiary nature of the question. But there's no way to defuse it. Even refusing to answer would be an answer.

This is a problem, imo. If Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is your enemy, you're fighting the wrong battle.

 

[Cid]

The question itself is a trap. How was she supposed to answer it?

Sorry, I know you wanted to leave the thread, but there isn't any answer to that question that doesn't nail you to one mast or another, such is the toxicity of debates around such issues. I can well believe that she thought that her answer might defuse the incendiary nature of the question. But there's no way to defuse it. Even refusing to answer would be an answer.

This is a problem, imo. If Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is your enemy, you're fighting the wrong battle.

Sure, but she's discussing it in a Reith lecture 5 years later. She could, for example, say what you just said. I'd probably still disagree with her, but it would be markedly better than throwing in some half remembered conversation with a student who has no right of reply. She isn't my enemy, I didn't introduce her to the thread, nor do I think she's a good example of cancel culture (I'm not actually sure there are any, unless a narrow definition/s is used). Though I don't have any problems with her students criticising her for it; they presumably know a lot more about the context than I do.

e2a: And to be absolutely clear my argument is less to do with the content of what she was saying, more to do with her using that to illustrate what she perceives as beliefs held in a quasi religious sense. I don't think that's justified.

 

[savoloysam]

I'd definitely say the phrase cancel culture itself is a bit useless - it's about an inch from 'woke' isn't it and trotted out by the sort of toxic right wing hypocrites who'll turn round and do the exact stuff they're moaning about without a moments hesitation given the opportunity.

I think most people would recognise though there's some truth in the depiction of a lot of left wing culture and particularly on social media involving a lot of pretty unpleasant behaviour and that often involves picking over of people's words and histories to find one thing that can be used to discredit and shout them down (and I'd dispute the idea that this is linked to ID politics particularly). I mentioned Mark Fisher's Exiting the Vampire Castle the other day in the context of Russell Brand and I think although I thought at the time Brand was an odd choice to use to make the point, and that's definitely the case with hindsight, a lot of what he says in there is pretty accurate isn't it.

I think maybe there's a point to be made about applying this to people who are ostensibly on your side as against those who definitely aren't. I think who gets to speak and be heard is inevitably going to be contested and if, say, Toby Young feels cancelled because he can't talk about Eugenics freely, then good. The effect of this stuff on the first group though is to continually reduce the people who are ok, who you're prepared to listen to. It doesn't get anywhere helpful at all. Obviously there's no definite clear line there (some people will view some strains of conspiracy theorist as being essentially on the same side for example while I'd be in favour of kicking them as hard as possible) but it should be possible to back off from some of this stuff a bit at least.

My argument is that freedom of speech doesn't not equal freedom from consequences and that goes for everyone. I guess the question is proportional consequences but I personally try to avoid the heavy debate with people that I disagree with because it's very hard to have a rational debate online with people you don't really know and will probably never meet.

 

[smokedout]

This is a problem, imo. If Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is your enemy, you're fighting the wrong battle.

I remember you using the exact same words about anti-vaxxer and Kanye West supporter Kiera Bell when she was attempting to ban trans healthcare for young people. I don't think you're qualified to decide who trans people should consider an enemy, particularly given your history of posting harmful misinformation about trans people on these forums.

I don't particularly think Adichie is an enemy, or at least not a priority. But her support of Rowling is revealing. The kind of polite transphobia and disinformation spread by Rowling has caused far more harm to trans people then 4chan slurs and other nonsense because of the unique power she posseses and Adichie's apologism for that suggests she either does not understand how transphobic myth building works or she agrees with her.

There seems to be a consensus amongst liberal transphobes that as long as you remain polite, don't call people trannys and don't say you want trans people dead than almost any lie, misinformation or slur is acceptable, not transphobic and fit to be published in the broadsheet newspapers. Yet someone with 20 followers on twitter saying fuck off terf in response is aggresive cancel culture. This reveals the power differentials at play and how allegations of cancel culture are used as an attempt to silence anyone challenging elite consensus. Because how do those challenged respond? With legal threats to silence people in Rowling's case and very public character assassinations of individuals with far less power or platform than her in Adichie's. You cross them and they will crush you, because they can, and have the power to do so. And they will claim to be the victims when they do it.

 

[smokedout]

She isn't my enemy, I didn't introduce her to the thread, nor do I think she's a good example of cancel culture (I'm not actually sure there are any, unless a narrow definition/s is used).

Milo Yiannopoulos is the only person I can think of offhand who has been genuinely cancelled for his views alone and I don't think that was a bad thing.

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

Yeah, I don't think you can ignore the power element here can you. The complaints about cancel culture are often loudest (and most ridiculous) when they come from people who are writing in national newspapers or magazines claiming to be 'cancelled' because some student has called them a racist or something. They tend to be egregious right wing fuckheads rather than people like Adichie (who I like a lot) but the principle is the same I think - she's the person in the powerful position here and while she might well have been on the end of some shitty stuff I don't think she's been cancelled in any meaningful sense.

With respect to the tendency for the left to eat itself though, and particularly on line, I think there's a tendency to see people as having some sort of power where it's so minuscule as to be basically meaningless. As soon as anyone gets a few followers on Twitter or manages to get themselves published somewhere or whatever it's like they're there to be shot at.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

To be clear I don't think Adichie has been cancelled. Of course she hasn't. But the calls for her and others to be disinvited from events are, to my understanding of the term, calls to 'cancel' them. Literally.

Such calls aren't the exclusive tactic of one 'side' of course, and the likes of Adichie can come under attack from both sides. Those who have prohibited her books from their institutions in the US haven't done so due to her definition of trans women.

 

[smokedout]

Social Media mobs aside none of this is anything new though. An entire generation of comedians were cancelled in the 80s (largely by some of those who whinge about cancel culture today). There were big protests when Nick Griffin was invited on Question Time and gave an address to the Oxford Debating Society. The same thing happened to David Irving. Colin Blakemore was violently assaulted and relentlessly attacked for his support of vivisection. Anita Bryant was pied in the 70s. People on this forum participated in cancelling holocaust denier Nick Kollerstrom - he lost his fellowship at UCL as a result and his stupid 911 conspiracy meeting at Conway Hall got cancelled.

People were also frequently cancelled by the right. Julian Clarey and Sinead O'Connor come to mind with devastating consequences for their careers. And they're still at it, look what the media did to Corbyn. It might be more visible now, and the reasons people are cancelled might have changed (as you'd expect with changing times) but it's nothing new. It has long been a political weapon for good and ill. The manufactured outrage about cancel culture I would suggest is an attempt by a resurgent right to both remove this tool from their critics, and to shift the Overton Window back in their favour by reintroducing ideas about race/sexuality/gender into public debate which had become viewed as unacceptable, offensive or simply unpopular.

 

[hitmouse]

Grave Lavery makes a good point here which is that to be cancelled, or claim to have been cancelled, already implies a privilege - you have to have something to lose. If you have no platform or are not high profile then you might get bullied off social media, get doxed, be subject to misogynist or other bigoted abuse, maybe even get in trouble at work and it will all be invisible. This concerns me a lot more than some celebrity or high profile individual using cancel culture as a weapon against their detractors. There are real problems with how social media is used that are worthy of discussion, but some best selling author living a life of luxury whining about being cancelled because someone criticised them and their fragile egos couldn't cope doesn't elicit much sympathy from me. So I guess to answer your last point it's about power, who has it and how do they wield it.

I mean, there's two different things there, are we talking about who experiences it or who gets a platform to talk about experiencing it? To say that it can only happen to people in a position of power or privilege is obviously rubbish, to say that the rich and famous are more likely to get sympathetic platforms to talk about it is true but then what? Are we, on urban, limited to only talking about what people with platforms in the media are talking about? It could well be that "cancel culture" is not a useful term, I'm certainly not particularly wedded to it, but then what would you suggest as a more useful one for describing working-class people who are subjected to social media bullying, doxxing, etc?

Social Media mobs aside none of this is anything new though. An entire generation of comedians were cancelled in the 80s (largely by some of those who whinge about cancel culture today). There were big protests when Nick Griffin was invited on Question Time and gave an address to the Oxford Debating Society. The same thing happened to David Irving. Colin Blakemore was violently assaulted and relentlessly attacked for his support of vivisection. Anita Bryant was pied in the 70s. People on this forum participated in cancelling holocaust denier Nick Kollerstrom - he lost his fellowship at UCL as a result and his stupid 911 conspiracy meeting at Conway Hall got cancelled.

Again, that seems like a starting point rather than an end point to me, unless the point is that "some tactics have historically been used against specific people in specific situations, therefore there's no discussion to be had about whether they're justified and/or effective in other situations?"

Actually will finish up by saying that are clearly some extremely harmful forms of social media pile-on. That's undeniable... And the language around this being quasi religious, which Adichie draws on heavily, is relevant there. But it takes a lot to unpick that from what is justifiable criticism (iirc contrapoints does a good job, but cba to rewatch).

Yeah, possibly Adichie wasn't the best example to start this thread off with - I did make an effort to provide various others in the OP, but it was Adichie I happened to have read that morning so she was more prominent in my head. Maybe we'd be having a different discussion if I'd quoted porpentine or Contrapoints instead.
Fwiw, from skimming through the transcript, the defining features Wynn names are 1) presumption of guilt, 2) abstraction, 3) essentialism, 4) pseudo-moralism/pseudo-intellectualism, 5) no forgiveness, and 6) the transitive property of cancellation. I'd probably have left 4 off, but I think the abstraction and essentialism are really worthwhile points to think about.

 

[smokedout]

I mean, there's two different things there, are we talking about who experiences it or who gets a platform to talk about experiencing it? To say that it can only happen to people in a position of power or privilege is obviously rubbish, to say that the rich and famous are more likely to get sympathetic platforms to talk about it is true but then what? Are we, on urban, limited to only talking about what people with platforms in the media are talking about? It could well be that "cancel culture" is not a useful term, I'm certainly not particularly wedded to it, but then what would you suggest as a more useful one for describing working-class people who are subjected to social media bullying, doxxing, etc?

I don't think they are the same thing really. To be no platformed you have to have a platform and most people don't. Attacks on working class people for their views or political activities are not in any way new, look at blacklisting which forced people out of entire industries. But that's an attack by capital on working class organisation and not comparable with some venue getting cold feet and cancelling an appearance by a controversial speaker or someone coming under heavy criticism on social media.

I suppose you could argue a supermarket worker getting sacked for being racist on facebook has similarities with what's called cancel culture, except they haven't been cancelled, they've been sacked and we have the language for that. There's a debate there that is necessary - the right of someone to have free speech and remain employed vs the right of someone to not have to work with an outspoken racist for example - and I guess there's been elements of that tension at play in the trans/terf conflict. But again we're not really talking about a new phenomena.

I raised the examples of historic cancellings not to undermine the discussion but to point out that what has become known as cancel culture has always existed. It's not a new or novel thing, and the common claim that it's coming from a woke and unusually censorious generation and represents some kind of free speech crisis is bogus. It's propaganda essentially, an attempt to create a moral panic as a means to pursue a political objective to try and shut down any resistance to usually right wing views that many consider harmful or offensive. So a protest outside a venue becomes an attempted cancelling (except no-one ever really gets cancelled). But its actually just a protest, same as might have happened at any point in the past, and an equally important element of free speech. If anything what goes on today is pretty tame compared to what happened to fascists, vivisectors and other groups which drew hostility from the left historically.

What has changed is the techonology. Journalists, celebrities and other public figures never used to hear what people said about them down the pub and now they do, and it hurts. Unless they managed to end up in the tabloids (the high priests of historic cancel culture) they never found out that as many people despised them as loved them. And they often react badly which gets them in even more trouble, or they deliberately provoke it as a way of raising their profile.

I think that's what Contrapoints is discussing really - her videos get millions of views, of those a few might grumble about something she said, a much smaller number will post something critical on twitter, and an even smaller number will say something threatening or truly offensive, but even a couple of dozen of those will feel very unpleasant and even frightening. But out of 5 million viewers some of them will be arseholes, it's pretty unavoidable and I don't really think there's a way round that beyond platforms moderating out the worst of it - which they will always be resistant to do because outrage drives clicks. That's where the debate should focus I think, how do we manage this social media nightmare, not is there is a new and uniquely censorious generation trying to destroy free speech (not saying anyone here is doing that btw, but that's the way it's usually presented).

 

[hitmouse]

Yeah, think it's the social media aspect that makes things interesting, like pre-internet there was a fairly linear relationship between having a Public Presence and there being a level of actual material comfort that goes with that, which made some aspects of the argument a bit more straightforward. (Although maybe even that can be overstated, I'm sure in the 80s there were probably all kinds of arguments about DIY punk bands and the like who had some level of public visibility without actually making money off it.) But with the internet you get this kind of diffusion, so the opinions of a racist supermarket worker or whoever can become so much more visible than they ever would've done before. I think it can be tempting to still view things through that kind of 20th-century lens, where we can kind of just go "fuck it, who cares, they're rich", even if we're actually talking about someone making videos in their bedroom or whatever.

 

[Jennaonthebeach]

Regarding Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I think that piece is very good. She herself got into social media trouble for some pretty mild comments in support of JK Rowling over trans issues.

LGB rights more like. Why shouldn't trans people criticise her? Why should we be silenced?