Edit (5/25/2021): Added onto my definition of “cancellation” and “cancel culture” and clarified the difference between the two terms. I also edited the final three paragraphs to clarify my argument and conclusion.
Picture this: A young journalist lands a job at the Associated Press; she graduated from Stanford University in May 2020. Two weeks later, she gets fired by the AP. Why? Because a student group called the Stanford College Republicans digs through her past, finds a history of pro-Palestinian activism and some old social media posts that they found objectionable, such as calling a Jewish, pro-Israel billionaire a naked mole rat, and pressured AP to fire her.
That young journalist’s name is Emily Wilder, and she had just been cancelled.
I’m starting off with this story because people are still talking about it as I’m typing this, and it’s also just one of many examples that exist. I should note that the concept of cancel culture is extremely slippery; a lot of the trouble with the discourse around it – as seems to be the trouble with a lot of discourse these days – is that people have differing definitions of it. By my estimation, cancellation is an umbrella term that covers a broad range of social behaviors usually relating to the social consequences of what an individual says or does, or has said or done in the past. Cancel culture, meanwhile, is what you get when such behavior is encouraged and accepted as part of the broader, well, culture. This can include social media pile-ons, attempts to get the individual banned from social media, putting pressure on their employer to fire the individual, and things like that.
Social consequences, by themselves, are not harmful. In fact, in proportion, they can be very useful in helping individuals learn how to better associate with their neighbors, coworkers, and society at large. This is especially true if they learn this from a young age. A child who learns that being a scumbag to his friends results in him losing those friends, is a child who is a lot less likely to be a scumbag as an adult.
The keyword here, however, is proportion. By my estimation, at least, this seems to be the common thread around which just about every controversy related to cancel culture is woven, even if no one really talks about it in those terms. Let’s refer to another example, one that’s a lot older but has also stood the test of social media memory – something not every social media controversy can attest to. In the early 2010s, Justine Sacco was about to board a plane to Africa, and tweeted out a (very clumsy) joke about being shielded from getting AIDs by virtue of her being white. The tweet went viral, and before she even got off the plane, it had received a lot of negative attention from other Twitter users, who went so far as to track her flight, get the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet to the top spot on the trending tab, and Buzzfeed even wrote a whole article titled “16 Tweets Justine Sacco Regrets.” She was promptly fired by her employer at IAC.
I speak for myself here, but that sort of response seems very disproportionate to the offense that she committed. Yes, those are social consequences; Sacco was never legally prosecuted for making a clumsy, racially insensitive joke on Twitter (which is a good thing, by the way). It’s one thing to chastise someone you know for saying or doing something insensitive. But it’s something else entirely to have thousands of people all do it to you, often in a manner that they would never use outside social media, in the span of a single international flight. And that’s before you account for the fact that the story was further amplified by several media outlets.
Although Emily Wilder’s cancellation was less dramatic and large scale, it still falls under the category of disproportionate social consequences; the only reason she was fired from the AP was because the Stanford College Republicans didn’t like her history of pro-Palestinian activism, or that she was willing to insult a Jewish billionaire. If this had happened to a pro-Israel conservative, they would be incensed - and rightly so, in my opinion. It’s especially ironic because it’s often conservatives who are the loudest denouncers of cancel culture, at least when they perceive anyone to their left engaging in it. Similarly, I’ve seen social justice activists proclaim that cancel culture is either inconsequential or even nonexistent, and then call out conservative hypocrisy around the issue in the same breath. What this tells me is that both sides of the culture war have a significant share of posturing hypocrites, who care about “owning” their ideological enemies more than trying to achieve any significant improvements for our society or our country.
So, long story short: Cancel culture is real, and it’s a problem. Specifically, it refers to a broad spectrum of behaviors that are often engaged in by social media users to impose some form of social punishment on an individual who has committed a real or perceived offense, whether it was in the past or present. Given the prevalence of cancellations on social media, how effective they can be at getting someone fired from their job, et cetera, I think it would be in the left’s interest to meaningfully critique these behaviors whenever and wherever they become disproportionate. Why? Because now, the cancel culture issue is primarily owned by the right and is being used to depict “the left” – liberals, socialists, it makes no difference – as hypersensitive and censorious. Not to mention, it’s just the right thing to do socially and morally. In moderation, social consequences are invaluable in terms of discouraging bad behavior, and can promote the growth and betterment of individuals. Cancel culture is what you get when social consequences are ramped up to disproportionate levels, for increasingly minor offenses, and made into weapons in the culture war. It’s time for the left to acknowledge the existence of cancel culture, and rather than simply using it as a cudgel against people who may not deserve it, promote a culture that values free speech just as much as it values tolerance and fairness. After all, you can’t truly have one without the other.