Thread by @ZeeshanAleem

Today I'm on the @nytimes' "The Daily" podcast talking with @Jonesieman about my personal brush with "cancel culture."

Here's a thread on the surreal story of the attempted "triple cancellation" I witnessed — and why I don't use the term "cancel culture" anymore.

So this whole episode went down in July, when I saw someone rallying a pack of online vigilantes to identify and pressure the employer of the infamous Florida Costco customer who went viral for yelling at a customer asking him to wear a mask.

From what I could tell, the Costco guy's behavior was terribly inappropriate, aggressive, and at least a bit unhinged. But I was skeptical of the idea that it was was judicious to immediately target this person for a job-firing campaign based on a 15-second clip.

So I wrote a thread pointing out that the vigilantes underestimated the potentially severe consequences of targeting people’s jobs in light of America’s merciless at-will employment norm, its tattered social safety net, and its linking of health care (often for family) to jobs.

I argued that pursuing swift, severe punishment against a civilian without context, deliberation or due process was not aligned with the spirit of a nationwide social movement critiquing our criminal justice system as hyper-punitive and sadistic.

I also pointed out that employers in these situations are not making appraisals of their employees' behavior in a vacuum. They're also making a calculation about reputational cost; it's a business decision fueled by protecting profit.

(The Costco guy lost his job btw.)

So I write this thread, and tag the leader of the pack. He dismissed my argument. I stepped away from my computer for a while and sort of forgot about it. But then I get a text from a friend showing me that alt-right troll and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec had retweeted it.

It turns out my thread had drifted into the MAGAsphere. While my thread was meant to engage with a primarily liberal and left audience, and had gotten traction in that realm, it was *also* all of a sudden going viral in hardcore right-wing corners of the Internet.

Even though everything I argued was antithetical to what this alt-right scene stood for, I had highlighted an instance of what they saw as Liberal Persecution of someone from their tribe. It was ideologically insincere but tactically convenient for them to boost it.

Soon my mentions were swarming with right-wing malcontents and activists, and all of a sudden a new mob quickly formed — to attack the leader of the initial job-firing campaign.

They went through his old tweets and dug up some, well, compromising tweets.

Turns out the head vigilante guy had several, well, "problematic" tweets primarily based on stereotypes of Black people that were at odds with what you'd expect from someone was ostensibly progressive and who had #BlackLivesMatter on his account.

Soon the right-wing mob was screenshotting those compromising tweets and tagging institutions that *he* was or had been affiliated with. In other words: the barrel of his own gun had been turned back at him.

He quickly made his account private.

He amended his Twitter bio to say: “People love things out of contexts!” and also took off links to his other personal accounts and website, and instead linked out to a Black Lives Matter page. I don't know what happened to him, but I suppose the activity died down eventually.

Then later, *I* was sent an email w/ the subject line “Cancel culture canceler” from a suspicious-looking email account, which Gmail flagged to me as a phishing attempt. “Read your little writing about canceling culture on twitter ... didn’t you just do the same thing?"

Needless to say, I didn't click on the link.

But the whole thing was head-spinning. I have a lot to say on this that's articulated better in my newsletter article, but I'll share a few thoughts here on this hurricane of stupidity.

A lot of people asked me "what are our alternatives?"

a) there are ways to stigmatize behavior that don't involve instantaneous, anonymous campaigns to take rando civilians' jobs w/out context.

b) If the diagnosis is the problem is systemic, it follows that the solution is too.

Doling out punishment to individuals when dealing with systemic problems is tricky business, but if we're rethinking punishment in this country it should be governed by a sensibility of humility and fairness, and underpinned by rehabilitative, system-oriented intentions.

Interpersonal interventions and norm-formation are necessary, but I genuinely think that a lot of people funnel rage at the symptoms because it’s so hard to wrap our minds around the roots, things like institutionalized racism in housing, education, wealth, employment, etc.

That work is slower; the victories are infrequent. There are few visceral payoffs.

Anyway, listen to The Daily podcast episode!

nytimes.com/2020/08/11/pod…

And read the newsletter I wrote about that crazy story that inspired the discussion with the Times:
zeeshanaleem.substack.com/p/4473648_what…

Also forgot to mention why I don't use the term "cancel culture."

1) It's a suitcase term which people pack a vast set of disparate ideas — and connotations — into. It's impossible to debate as a general concept because the terms are so hard to pin down.

I'm not all that concerned about a shouty public culture online, but I do think job targeting campaigns are not-infrequently highly questionable.

Specificity is the path to enlightenment — just talk about the specific practice and specific instance you want to discuss.

2) I am not all that interested in trying to recover the term through some collective quest to define it because I think it has ultimately been poisoned by polarization. Trump's embrace of the term has rendered it impossible to use in good faith, and made it radioactive.