Thread by @eaton

A great example of what “cancellation“ really looks like: loss of ad and subscriber revenue when an influencer pisses of the audience they’ve cultivated. filaxis.pro

The point being: this falls in the same category as business insurance in case you fuck up a gig, or insurance for an athlete whose income can be zero’d by injury.

“Cancellation” — aka audience backlash — is a risk for people whose visibility is equivalent to their livelihood. While that is nontrivial, it has always been thus; no one is entitled to other peoples’ attention.

It feels cold to say that, but it”s what I’ve meant over the years when I said that the fear of “cancellation” boils down to three factors: the rise of personal brands, reduced communication friction for (previously) low-visibility consumers, and changing cultural standards.

Conservatives and reactionaries, fundamentally, are angry about #3 — cultural excision has always been a part of maintaining in- and out-groups, but they now find themselves on the wrong side of a few lines as cultural acceptance of racism, sexism, etc. wavers.

There’s a class of nominally liberal tastemakers and public figures (folks @nberlat terms “the chattering class”) threatened by #2; the unwashed masses may be individually voiceless, but if you write a shit enough column, they can mob you, and you are less insulated than before.

Finally there’s the #1 group — influencers, personal-brands, patreon artists, ”stream with a schtick” folks. The attention economy and modern social web has given them an income stream that’s busking-equivalent: labor intensive, very occasionally lucrative, and very fragile.

A next generation engine of “cancellation” would combine blocktogether-style crowdsourcing with browser extension and pihole style filtering to let consumers passively opt out of their ingroup’s aggregate outgroup; rss for boycotts.

A few information generations ago, copyright law changed radically, shifting from “a window of exclusivity” to “functionally eternal ownership of cultural artifacts.” The ongoing cultural engagement with art and narrative was radically reframed, grouped with theft and fraud.

For every penniless widower of a beloved writer whose public domain work “should’ve” left the family rich, there’s an army of lawyers stamping on fanfic kids and fighting to keep out of print works undigitized.

The “anti-cancel” call has no way to distinguish cancellation, on the individual level, from simply not-consuming. Because an attention economy recognizes no such difference. To look away is to opt out; to opt out is to boycott; to do so in a hyperconnected world is to organize.

Eventually, any mechanism of shared filtering becomes an existential risk. Even aggregate disapproval — if it can be captured in semantically precise form — is just as dangerous, since its signals nudge the taste-shaping algorithms that dominate an oversaturated inormation space.

Illegal, underground cancellation toolkits market themselves with a fig leaf of deniability: “Find the best voices from the communities you trust” becomes the next “for personal time-shifting only.”

In the public sphere, failure to comment on freshly-published cultural artifacts is regarded with suspicion: silence begets silence, and silence is cancel. Public figures and media workers come to rely on automated praisebots; anything less requires too much explanation.

The arms race continues: gen-∩ streamers lace their effusive praise with vocal tics and flourishes that form a new language of critique, a thieves cant of cultural commentary, bypassing cancelguards until new patches are deployed.

Underground speakeasies, doors plastered with glowing reviews for Zombie David Brooks’ new book to throw off the heat, give elite tastemakers a secret safe space to blow off steam — admitting that Zizek just hasn‘t been the same since that second reanimation in ‘47.

You drink, you laugh, you — sudden darkness as the bar’s power is cut, and staccato pops of microexplosives as drones blow the door. Glass is shattering, chairs knocked to the floor and the screaming starts.

Blood red as the emergency lights kick on, the scream of an alarm as someone forces a fire door open. Cutting-bright threads of light knife through the smoke, tracing you before you can run. You’re spotted, and the drone is on you like a wolf.

Inches from your face, lenses locked on yours to measure pupil dilation, weigh the truth of your answer as a teleoperator’s voice crackles over the open link.

“So, what did you think of Bret’s substack last week?“