- Position‹3 of 4›
- Cancel culture must be cancelled
Cancel culture is a form of ideological policing. Social media has reduced privacy. Simultaneously, trust in the state is being fast eroded. Truth is increasingly elusive in our news, our media and our politics. This crisis of authenticity, and what to believe, means there is no longer a set of agreed upon facts about how to engage with each other, or draw conclusions from what we see. The combination of these two factors has turned us all into informants. In this case, cancel culture is a survival strategy. One built on individual performance of the surveillance state. Proponents include author Kat Rosenfield and key figures in the left wing press including New Republic reporter Osita Nwanevu.
The argument
Cancel Culture is the name given to a recent trend in society to shame, verbally attack, and exclude those who either disagree with a certain commonly held belief, or take part in an ethically questionable act. It is harmful to society because of what it does to everyone watching rather than only to the person at its centre: it instils fear in those who oppose the masses, and it has resulted in the forming of a surveillance state. The conditions that make this possible are recent ones. In an era where social media is many people's main source of news, and information can be spread to millions in just seconds, a judgement reached by a few can become a general verdict before anyone has established the facts, which is why many believe that Cancel Culture is growing into a disturbing movement. The speed also changes the incentives facing bystanders. For fear of becoming a target themselves, many people feel they must weigh in publicly, regardless of how ignorant they are on the subject, because silence can be read as complicity. What follows is the surveillance. People will dig through years upon years of tweets, posts, and pictures to find something problematic to display to the world, and the search is retrospective by design — it is aimed at a version of a person who existed before the standard now being applied to them. Two things are lost in that process. The first is privacy, since nothing said in the past is ever settled and any record can be reopened at any time. The second is forgiveness, because the format offers no route by which someone might acknowledge a fault and move past it. What remains is the relinquishment of power from the hands of individuals, to that of the uninformed mob.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Many believe that Cancel Culture is not the sign of the declining values of freedom of speech but simply society at large grouping together to exercise their rights, much like a boycott. Anne Charity Hudley, a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara stated that Cancelling was " a way to acknowledge that you don’t have to have the power to change structural inequality...But as an individual, you can still have power beyond measure [online]”. Hudley and many others believe that instead of a thoughtless mob, bent on destroying free speech, Cancel Culture is simply a collective group of progressives exercising their rights over a digital platform.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Someone who disagrees with a widely held belief and someone who has done something the public objects to are different cases, and the premise's own definition runs them together — which is exactly what the rival positions dispute. [Rejecting P2] Searching old posts is described as surveillance, but the material is what the speaker chose to publish. The argument does not distinguish scrutiny of public statements from the monitoring the term implies. [Rejecting P3] "Removed all privacy" and "denied any forgiveness" are absolute claims offered without instances, and the counter-argument sets out the rival characterisation the premise never answers: that this is collective social and consumer pressure of the kind a boycott has always involved.