1) I regret to inform you I have thoughts about 'cancel culture.' The first is...
2) When people call something a 'culture' it's good reason to be on guard. 'Culture' can be a useful term when placed in clear context or when used in knowingly broad ways, but less so when trying to name a specific phenomenon. To say there's a 'culture' behind e.g. ...
3) ...firings or internet shamings is a kind of misdirection. It's either an effort or just a sloppy way to describe something with more tangible and changeable causes.
4) To the extent 'cancel culture' is a 'culture,' cancel culture is corporate culture. But there's a better way to describe it: cancel culture is precarity + managerial discipline.
5) As many have pointed out, there's nothing new about people saying stuff they shouldn't have said or acting like jerks, racists, and spoiled children. And there's nothing new about wanting such people to be called to account. And there's nothing new about people not agreeing on
6) whether someone facing a backlash for what they said or did deserves it, or whether they did something wrong. To the extent anything is new, it's that (a) precarity is the default or choice labor structure and tactics of managerial discipline and control are further along now
7) than they've been, aided in part by technologies that enable surveillance and a zero-tolerance, cover-your-ass approach to management. And (b) even people in high places are subject to forms of precarity (because of (a)).
8) Calling totally predictable and longstanding value conflicts a 'culture' makes it seem like the way to reform whatever problems there are with 'cancel culture' is through personal reforms, hearing out 'the other side,' etc., even when 'the other side' is some asshole ...
9) ...who got caught on video telling an Asian-American family walking their dog on a trail 'you can't be in this country,' or some pathetic, vile, smallminded concentrated form of human failure such as that. But I think the solution is much simpler than changing hearts & minds..
10) ...of individuals with varying reasons to listen or not to listen or who may be ill equipped to process their own shortcomings without turning it into a tantrum. Instead...
11) We need labor rights and labor protections. Then we'll find out really quickly if a firing is justified (say, a person with a title like 'Chief People Officer' who accosts an Asian-American family with racist vitriol maybe isn't fit to lead the People Office anymore)...
12) ...or if what's really going on is people are just saying mean words to journalists. I don't see this as a 'cultural' problem. I see it as a labor rights issue. If people *really* want free speech, and want to uphold free expression as a *value*, ....
13) ...the *first* thing they should want to change is an 'at-will' employment framework that makes it easy to fire people for any or no reason whatsoever, and a broader economic policy build on precarity and surveilling the workforce (even policing people who are out of a job).
14) If people *really* want to change 'cancel culture,' they should become activists and advocates for labor and for decoupling essential things like health insurance from the workplace. But I suspect people would rather fight a *culture* war. /end
