A response to Sandra at Idiomdrottning:
2021-03-28 - When someone complains about cancel culture
I fairly recently read a comment that speaks my mind:
Cancel culture is ~5 separate things and conflating them serves the purposes of the powerful. It allows celebrities who are accused of sexual assault to act like they’re in the same boat as a rando who got spammed by a Twitter mob over a bad joke
I’d say that several of the things that go by the name of ‘cancel culture’ are good, but a few aren't. The rule of thumb that I go by looks mainly at how much power the person being ‘canceled’ has, though the severity of the offense and the grace of the cancelee’s reaction also matter.
But even though I think it's good that powerful people be held accountable for their words and actions, I also feel like the use of ‘mob power’ is a manifestation of something about our society that is not healthy. Sandra points out how multicast social media empowers a mob more than just pitchforks and torches would. But I think the characteristic feature of internet mob culture is that it is a manifestation of powerlessness.
Under liberal democracy, an engaged group of people like today’s cancel mobs would expect to be able to engage in the political sphere – to petition City Hall, or take a bill to their congressperson. But under neoliberalism, that isn't really the case. The functions of government are hollowed out, for one thing: a lot of decisions are just turned over to the market, where groups of citizens can't exercise collective power. And secondly, government officials under neoliberalism tend to be beholden to the corporate world or at least the corporate worldview. In this context, millions of individuals on the internet are *powerless* over matters of substance, the kind of thing that you would organize over under liberal democracy. But on issues of language or symbolism, internet mobs can be quite powerful. So when someone powerful (and therefore effectively untouchable in the legal or political realm) commits an offense, *especially* an offense in the cultural realm, it's natural for people to exercise power in the only way they can, even (or especially) when it's not materially effective.
Sometimes? That’s better than any actually-existing options for action. But it would be better if we could organize in the political realm.