Thread by @ntnsndr

I wonder if the anxiety over "cancel culture" stems more from changes in the supply side of the attention economy than the demand side, where the blame usually goes.

Let me break that block of text down a bit.

When people complain about "cancel culture" (hereafter CC), it tends to be a complaint about the "mob," about the sheeple who turn on a dime and drop their celebs for the merest infraction against whatever is "woke" or "politically correct" (or simply the values they cherish).

But what about the influencers themselves, the people cancelled? What if we seem to see more CC because it has become so much easier to be an influencer with a reasonably sized and devoted following?

If it is easier to become an influencer, it might be easier to enter that role without the practice and training in what it takes to be a careful and successful one.

If there are more influencers to choose from, there are more exit options, lowering the cost of switching.

Another feature of this dynamic may be that an influencer quickly elevated by social algorithms may feel an outsized sense of deserving their role, that it should be theirs forever, rather than recognizing they owe it to highly ephemeral networks.

(This is the sort of thing one might especially expect from people who are used to enjoying the benefits of various forms of privilege.)

People complain about mobs exiting their influencers, but they don't complain about how algorithms just as quickly steer accumulations of audiences toward particular influencers. What about those mobs?

If we invert the CC problem, maybe we see that the problem is the ease of becoming an influencer, and the algorithms that induce it.

I also can't resist the supposition that the "implicit feudalism" of online platforms (ntnsndr.in/implicitfeudal…), the absence of mechanisms for holding online community leaders accountable, helps ensure that exit is the only meaningful option for dissenters.

Cf. @enfascination and I (ntnsndr.in/effectivevoice): Although we associate "voice" with what social platforms enable, it is really only "affective voice," not the kind of "effective voice" that can hold power-holders directly accountable (like, by voting them off the island).

So, a few suggestions! When you start worrying about CC, you might instead consider:

How did this person obtain such power in this community, and did it come with a process through which the person could learn the effects of that power, and practice wielding it responsibly?

How does the rapidity by which people exit compare to how they joined?

Are there missing forms of "graduated sanctions" (via Ostrom) that the "mob" did not have available to them, leaving exit and blanket denouncement the only option for holding people more powerful than them accountable?

Is the influencer complaining about CC offering meaningful, alternative forms of accountability, or attempting to evade accountability altogether?

What makes someone entitled to influence?