Kaepernick is an unusual case because he was shut out of a very specific profession with profoundly weird incentives. (He absolutely was blackballed and shouldn't have been, but it's also relevant that he had declined precipitously in terms of performance at that point.) But getting frozen out of the NFL actually increased his visibility and opened the door to different kinds of sponsorships and all manner of interesting new career paths.
The dimension of the Kaepernick discussion that always seems to get left out is that football teams are an entertainment product. Whatever team he joined would be in the spotlight constantly for non-football reasons and would earn a politicized brand that possibly alienated a lot of its fanbase. I don't see why any team would willingly put itself in that spot for a replacement level QB.
In a world where he's just a cog that goes into the football optimization machine, some of the people running the machine might have made a mistake. But in this world they're selling a TV show and at the time I don't think he proved himself to be a popular character.
Chrissy Teigen got canceled over behavior, not politics, but it’s still widely considered a cancellation. For me, cancel culture is when someone is declared “bad,” and their own people (their allies and partners) immediately cease to associate with them. And making amends (apologizing, etc) doesn’t matter.
I strongly disagree. It marks a difference in social treatment that is essentially unlike in kind to how most transgressions would traditionally be handled. Cancel culture is at play when a person's intrinsic character is on trial, rather than their behavior.
Great documentary, and as much as I enjoy their earlier work -- no doubt fueled in part by college-era nostalgia -- that film and their 2006 album are much more emotionally rich than I was prepared for at the time. (The record, like so many of the CD era, would benefit from being about 15 minutes shorter, but oh well.)
To my mind, what makes a cancellation is the all-encompassing nature of the thing and the unusually outsized and inorganic consequences. The lack of a pathway to redemption makes it a cancellation. The transgression (whether real or perceived) is not actually treated as the kind of behavioral transgression that all of us will, at some point, to varying degrees, make in life. It is treated, instead, as the *worst* kind of transgression, one which isn't really a transgression at all, so much as it is a revelation that one possesses an irredeemably broken character. The way the thing is treated as a fundamental and ineradicable stain on the person as a human being -- rendering a judgment of the transgressor as being so permanently unfit for society that a path of reintegration shouldn't even be offered -- is what makes it a cancellation.
[Deleted and reposted, for the sake of elaboration.]
I was just going to write this. It's always the least among us that the pay the most for power flexing its muscles. I'm from the Rust Belt. That is why I was a liberal until recently (I'm now an independent - I'm so PO'd that I can no longer wholesale align with the left although I still support specific policies like reproductive rights, etc.). I believed that government should try to somewhat balance the outsized privileges of power and money through regulation and not allow the biggest players to win everything; that it should at the very least give the little guy/gal a chance at a decent life. This doesn't always mean money, either. Things like unions, OSHA, wage and tax policies, funding for education, etc. can help a great deal to provide people with opportunity. I'm afraid Obama's giveaway to the banks cured me for good in terms of believing that the left cares about the little guy.
I have not followed you very long, Freddie, and I spend zero time on Twitter so I didn't know about your cancellation. It makes me glad that I recently subscribed here. I am proud to be someone who can contribute in a small way to you becoming "uncancelled." I don't believe anyone should be cancelled—at least not the way the process is currently utilized—to destroy careers and families. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. We all have the right to ignore what we don't like (eg. white supremacists, tv shows, books) and punish where laws are broken. But I abhor vigilante/mob justice. It is anathema to a liberal democracy.
In exchange for my subscriptions, you and other writers on Substack (the usual suspects - GG, MT, BW, JM), keep me sane in a world going slowly mad. I find light, love, truthtelling and lucidity here; a variety of thoughtful viewpoints; and wonderful conversation. Thank you so much!
I think you made a mistake apologizing for the twitter shit. It sounds like you did other things outside of social media that were worthy of apology, the medication, and the soul-searching, but twitter is just a video game. Trying to hold someone responsible for something they post on twitter is the same as calling for violence against a person IRL cuz they beat you in Call of Duty. People seem to have lost sight of this fundamental ridiculousness in social media culture.
None of the current popular social media platforms are realistic enough or designed in such a way as to rise to the level of "morally the same as real life."
This is a problem because humans are, in important ways, unable to completely understand that there's another human being on the end in the same way we do when standing face to face. App makers can design their apps to help alleviate this massive problem but most don't because it cuts into their profits.
It doesn't bring out the worst in you because it's not you at all. There are so many behavior-influencing algorithms at work and that, combined with basic text being the nature of these services, means that whatever words appear are not your own, but those of an algorithmic construct that uses you to hit some keys.
We have no identity that is completely apart from the context we engage in. I don't have the stomach for it, but life in general would be much better if twitter was rendered a toxic unusable wasteland cuz everybody wouldn't stop telling everyone else to kill themselves. That behavior is actually more ethical than just posting normally and taking the platform seriously by making it more money.
I fundamentally can't agree with the premise that people aren't morally responsible for their social media behavior, but I do wholly agree with your point about not engaging with it earnestly in a way that lends it credibility and influence. That's the exact reason I don't have any social media accounts anymore. Substack comments are as close as I get, and I have no regrets. Once its hooks are thoroughly removed, social media almost never manages to look appealing frm the outside.
I don't have any social media accounts either and it's excellent.
I have been very successful in my job as a therapist at getting mentally unwell people to deactivate their social media accounts. The vast majority find that it improves their lives beyond words and never go back.
Many people haven't gotten to the level where they understand responsibility for online posts isn't the same as responsibility for IRL actions. Until our societies advance to that level of understanding or we get 100% accurate VR, ignoring social media platforms entirely is the best way to go IMO.
Twitter could maybe make a lot of fundamental changes in order to rise to the level where people have responsibility for what they say on it. It's not even close currently, however.
The reason I became a subscriber was because I thought Freddie’s pieces on that were such a beautiful exploration of guilt. I also think he’s way too hard on himself about what happened. If that’s necessary for his well-being, I certainly support that. But I think the problem is that he’s a good person and thus feels guilty about what is, frankly, not that outside the boundaries for Twitter. The shit that Jesse Singal deals with on that platform everyday seems equally heinous. There seems to be a fundamental unfairness that the person who pays the price for it is the person capable of realizing it’s wrong.
"[...] the person who pays the price for it is the person capable of realizing it’s wrong."
This is brutally true, particularly in relation to the internet, but also more generally. It is a depressing fact that a person with a well-developed conscience is at a disadvantage, because it provides constraints on their behavior that many of their antagonists won't similarly have. It can occasionally be a benefit, when it makes the conscience-haver more sympathetic to observers, but too often, it's effectively a liability.
I find this reality maddening, but I can't deny that it is, in fact, reality. Unfortunately, I'm not sure where that leaves those of us who refuse to adapt to it by letting the ends always justify the means. ...fucked, maybe. But I hope not. Misanthropic as I can be, at times, I seem to have an inexhaustible conviction that humanity may yet surprise me.
Funny you mention canceling. If it wasn't a Short week I'd be salivating for you to tear apart the recent Michael Hobbes' article, which had me in a fit of rage like nothing since the Harper's Letter reaction. But take your time. We'll be around.
I looked into his Twitter a bit. He regularly sneers at Michelle Goldberg as the NYT's "Woke Panic Reporter."
And this is a common pattern I see with Woke Twitter. Their worldview is practically hegemonic in national media, yet they go into a pants-shitting rage over the occasional woke-skeptical piece as if the Barbarians are at the gates ready to invade. They have power but like to pretend they don't. It's so bizarre.
As Freddie points out regularly, they have the trappings of power (institutions governing symbolism and culture) without having the corresponding actual real world power. If they did then they would actually materially help disadvantaged groups en masse.
I remember Ezra Klien making this point that cancelling doesn't hurt anybody to Sam Harris when those two sparred over Harris interviewing Charles Murray. At the time I followed the IDW, I would after that read about the awful history of IQ tests in the US and discover Michael Brooks and MR and stopped listening to Harris. But Harris had a point that a) he certainly felt the impact of the criticism he was receiving, and b) he had avoided interviewing Charlies Murray. Now maybe that's good. But to your point, cancelling clearly does work. Al Franken and Louis CK are two examples that come to mind. As does Cosby...so in some cases it's a good thing.
Do courts of law often do justice for victims of sexual assault? I wish they did and have fought for such reforms for a long time, but I don't blame women for taking justice into their own hands, frankly.
I agree on Cosby and Spacey and Weinstein. I've gone back and forth about Louis. But where's the line? Who draws it? What about Aziz?
And what about a figure like Charles Murray and his bell curve? I've never read it but have heard the case of how racist it is. Is Harris ok to interview him?
Publicizing the case of Aziz was a very clever move by cultural elites to limit the scope of metoo discourse. They wanted to make it clear that the range of unacceptable behavior was Weinstein at one end and Aziz at the other. It would have been catastrophic in their view if meetoo's focus had shifted from helping the right kind of women to helping women in general.
Cultural elites? I'm pretty sure it was a bunch of barely-twentysomethings running the site that published the Aziz story. To me, it indicates more of a generational gap than anything - these are kids who grew up on campuses that have taken what ought to be legal matters into their own kangaroo courts; I'm not so surprised that someone growing up in that era would want revenge.
Another consideration is that, as cancellation has developed as a strategy, counter-cancellation tools have emerged to deal with it. As more people are canceled out of the progressive mainstream, it becomes easier and easier to make a go of things as part of a new (but rapidly growing) group of "canceled" intellectuals.
Substack being a fine example of this. It's garnered the reputation as some kind of right-wing coterie. First of all: I wish. Second of all: that would surely give credence to the idea that people on the right are canceled more often. It's survivor bias, same with Rumble. There are plenty of people from the left on these alternative platforms, but the mainstream, liberal left has near-total control of legacy platforms such as Twitter, not to mention broadcast and print media, so they don't need these counter-cancelation tools.
Which still isn't great. I don't want to fall into an echo chamber of the cancelled, any more than an echo chamber of the woke. And Substack is a poor substitute for having the resources of a real journalistic organization.
"And Substack is a poor substitute for having the resources of a real journalistic organization."
Color me unconvinced. The supposed fact-checkers at legacy organizations like the AP and Reuters are a self-parody. Glenn Greenwald - one guy with a laptop - did a far better job on the Congressional hearings on social media earlier this year than the entire prestige press put together. There are crowdfunded local journalists covering local beats better than the local TV channel has ever done - not many of them, but there are some. The correlation between "having a ton of money and an org chart and a shiny building" and "doing careful, meticulous journalism" seems to me practically non-existent.
Which, if true, is exactly why it's bad. It's like saying "Totalitarianism works! Disobedience to the Party is down 90%!"
Of course, these guys aren't honest totalitarians. That's why the rhetoric is self-contradictory. The cancelers want to believe that they are justified because they are in the position of weakness. But the very effectiveness of their strategy gives the lie to the claim -- they are actually in a position of astonishing strength. They just can't admit it.
De-platforming can work against individuals, on a short time scale, while still doing nothing to further the political goals of the totalitarians doing the canceling - usually the reverse, by undermining their credibility and provoking backlash.
People defend policies on their weakness all the time. Freddie has done so himself on the usage of CRT in schools. I also hear it constantly in the immigration debate - that people aren't really using the asylum laws, that people aren't really using the remain-in-country laws. In all cases it's obfuscation. And why not? It works depending on the circumstance. The old misattributed quote: "When I am weaker than You, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles." When I can't cancel you, it's imperative that I can. When I can, not only did I cancel you, but I didn't do it and there's no such thing as cancelling anyway. This is a distillation of power and doesn't require consistency nor explanation.
>On Dec. 2, 2002, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld signed a memorandum authorizing interrogation techniques against detainees at Guantanamo that the current [2011] President of the United States, Barack Obama, has described as "torture."
In a handwritten notation he scrawled at the bottom of the memo, Rumsfeld wrote, "I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?"
So I mostly agree with this at its core (that is, that cancelation more often than not harms vulnerable people and fails to do much at all to the powerful), but I'd also note that you don't see much of Alex Jones or Milo Yiannopolous these days.
I disagree on his chances but I take your point. It wouldn't be quite in the spirit of things to lump him in with the powerless. (Although I know he fundraises off that image.)
I don't know. Private companies proved that they have the ability to effectively remove a sitting President from the de facto public square. That strikes me as a pretty big win for canceling against the powerful, even if he later manages to whistlestop his way to electoral victory.
It was a minor but non-trivial factor in Trump's 2016 victory, less because it moved the needle towards him but because the Democratic Party's digital obsession was so grotesque they played into his hands. (Recall Hillary releasing, nationwide, a video about a 'talking frog'.) I think online people like us do tend to overstate the importance of Twitter so I don't disregard the thrust of your point, but in specific cases like this it doesn't work. Trump and Twitter were synonymous. His visibility and fundraising ability absolutely have declined since his banning. This isn't to say he's some meek and powerless martyr, but you can't say it's just a game.
The Trump - twitter debacle was one of the final straws that caused me to write social media off forever. It is fundamentally a video game but people can decide to treat it like it's real. Their failure to follow their own guidelines and ban Trump years before they did showed with great finality that it's a mistake to pretend that particular video game should have any impact on reality.
Eh. It's where the news gets its news. I agree that on its own it is vapid and meaningless, but when mainstream journalism treats it as reality, it has an extraordinary effect on whose ideas get seen and discussed. That's not a comment on whether it SHOULD be the public square, but I don't think it makes sense to deny its influence on journalism, and therefore public opinion.
(That's not to say that there isn't a whole world of opinion outside of social media. But if you want to influence people today, where do you go? Do you literally go to the town square and pass out leaflets? My guess is no.)
This is why journalism is completely worthless these days: anyone who has an active twitter account is bound to be wrong the vast majority of the time, and journalists fit that bill.
Greenwald seems to be a weird exception, but he also seems to understand that twitter's only legitimate purpose is for trolling and he's really good at that.
I have a sneaking suspicion Trump's Republican "allies" are perfectly happy to keep Trump, the man, out of the spotlight even as the use Trump, the icon, as best they can.
In their position, I'd certainly rather have someone like Christopher Rufo managing the Message than Trump.
I was more getting at the idea that even people who oppose cancel culture make the mistake of thinking that things posted on social media are legitimate and the same as saying something IRL.
Twitter is a video game and Chappelle gets it. Do you understand that it's a video game, or do you empower the cancellers by pretending twitter is real?
I feel a special pity for those whose jobs require them to take social media seriously. The rest of us can and should ignore it.
Saying it's a video game doesn't mean anything in particular. People get paid to play actual video games, they have emotional reactions to them, and they spend time on them, so even video games aren't meaningless the way you assert they are. It's probably healthy not to take social media too seriously, but people do. Saying they shouldn't doesn't change that. People who don't empower the cancelers can still lose their jobs or get harassed. As you said, a non-trivial number of people have jobs in social media. So I see what you're getting at, but I think it's incorrect.
It generates a whole lot of gravity for "not a real place," significantly distorting public discourse. It's not alone (or novel) in doing so, but that doesn't rob it of its influence.
I agree. The best I can do is point out that twitter users are responsible for cancel culture simply by being twitter users who have goals other than ruining the platform. You can use twitter or you can credibly oppose cancel culture, but you can't do both.
>Now playing at your local theater: probably not Dave Chappelle’s documentary, which the comedian says is being dropped by film distributors after his recent Netflix comedy special sparked a fight with transgender activists.
>The documentary, which chronicles the comic’s efforts to hold standup shows during the pandemic in his neighbor’s Ohio cornfield, has seen its invitations to film festivals rescinded, according to a video clip he posted to Instagram.
...
>The outspoken comic said the documentary had scored invitations to major film festivals across the country, but now “nobody will touch this film.”
He's not canceled at all. Who cares about film festivals? The Closer has been viewed millions of times and Netflix will continue to work with Dave Chapelle. The 'protests' the media spent a week hyping up against him were pathetically small.
If you could guarantee that cancellation would only ever take place against the rich and powerful, and wouldn't ultimately trickle down to those who - in your view - might actually be impacted, this would be a convincing argument. But instead the default mode of activism among the online Left is cancellation. You can't be even slightly surprised when, having failed to completely banish Chappelle from public life, people eager to claim a scalp go for a softer target. To claim, as you do, that this was all somehow to Chappelle's benefit is only going to exacerbate that trend. Your kind benediction, that of giving someone on the wrong path the time to consider their transgressions... how is that going to ensure anything other than constant, scattergun cancellation? It's for their own good, after all.
I think you're assuming a position I haven't taken at all.
Cancelation is a shitty tactic that, as Freddie has previously stated, cannot bring about systemic change. People who believe that cancelation is a just tactic are not actually leftists at all, just performative losers attempting to acquire social currency.
I am enjoying how bad these losers are looking right now in light of their failure to end Chappelle's career, which was obviously their goal.
"What actually happened was the general public gave an almost unanimous thumbs-up to the show, and the essentially universal condemnation of these media neurotics fell flat as Netflix — whose revenues jumped to $7.4 billion in the third quarter of this year — blew off demands to cancel the show. The press tried to hype a crisis into existence and failed, that’s all."
Failed in what sense, that he's still alive and still has a career? Yeah, obviously. As Freddie correctly says, the more powerful you are, the more you can withstand it. But he's obviously faced some minor consequences. So, the tactic works.
The tactics did not totally fail. A handful of Netflix employees did get an unreasonable amount of press that is used to shame Chapelle and limit his future options. There is an impact, even if it’s not the total cancellation from Netflix that they are going for. Chapelle will be fine but I don’t think even rich folks particularly enjoy a public shaming. Who does???
Personally the controversy encourage me to watch Chapelle for the first time. The fact that he was condemned as being homophobic made me uninterested in listening to him in the past. I am bisexual and just don’t have time for that shit.
But I am always curious to here from people who’s ideas are so dangerous that there is a movement to censor them.
I found his show to be quite funny and not homophobic at all. I am still probably not going to listen to his prior work, but I will consider it.
I had the opposite reaction. I remember a year-ish ago the Geisel estate "cancelled" some obscure Dr. Seuss books for racism or whatever, and sales of the non-obscure books skyrocketed. When I saw this Chapelle shit, I assumed that Netflix expected the controversy, protests, etc and knew that they would ultimately boost their profile. I saw it as cynical free press, so I'm staying away.
Maybe that's a bit too tin-foil hat, but it seems plausible to me.
It's a well-worn tactic on the Right. "Grr, this brave patriot's too spicy for the left! Watch this video before he gets Cancelled by Big Tech and the Liberal Media! Rawr! You won't believe his takes on Taiwan! Don't let the censors win!" 30 minutes of Heritage Foundation boilerplate follows.
I remember reading Freakonomics in high school, about a this "rogue" economist. Then I got a degree in economics and learned that Stephen Levitt is pretty popular and mainstream.
Out of interest, when you write at this length, do you find you have to consciously cut out parts of your argument or do you just not look for extra depths? Would a longer article have had this ending somewhere in the first third, or would it have reached the same end by a longer path? Or are there long and short subjects?
Hard to say. I'm enjoying it but I'm glad it's just one week. (I will try and write the occasional shorty in the future though.) I am obviously more parsimonious and definitely do choose the topics carefully. I find it's more of a staging area for comment conversation this way, which in particular works well for tomorrow morning's post, which is a hypothetical. But I'm not sure how these would be different otherwise.
FWIW, I am also glad it's only a week. Your writing never comes across to me as poorly edited or needlessly wordy, so it's all enjoyable to read, length be damned. I don't know who these complainants are, but they're cancelled, in my book!
Speaking of a staging area for comments -- alongside Astral Codex Ten, your comments section is by far my favorite on Substack. I've thought, for a while now, that an "open thread" feature similar to ACX's might be really nice here too. Just a thought.
ACX tends to have decent comments but substack's comment system is such that the volume of comments renders it nigh unusable.
I gave the ACX discord (the one Scott links to on the front page) a try, but it turns out it's administered by a sad loser who bans people for winning arguments against him. Scott never visits at all and the philosophy there has nothing to do with Scott's in practice.
The fact that cancellation doesn't work against the rich and powerful is a great point. Trump is a perfect example of this. He also couldn't be shamed out of public life because he has no shame, as Louis Theroux said.
As an old-school lefty from a union family, it truly sickens me to see left-liberal people smugly tag the employer of someone they don't like in a tweet, hoping to get them fired. The world has been dragged very far from where it should be.
If the hassle keeps Chappelle from saying his piece in the future, the cancellation worked. It will definitely keep other, less wealthy and powerful, artists from speaking their minds, self-censoring to avoid the trouble. Is the point to make the offender literally disappear or to control the conversation? I'd say the latter, and it seems to be working.
The chilling effect is not opposed because it's a chilling effect, but because it might interfere with democracy. Well, you may say, there's no problem there - democracy is a good thing after all. Sure, it is. Now wait until democracy is more narrowly defined. Now an opposition to the chilling effect doesn't protect your view of democracy. Hungary is a private country and can chill what they want. Many such cases!
Yes, it is working. Even on Chappelle: it seems to me that there is no question that he will have fewer opportunities going forward. And so maybe he'll avoid satirizing the anti-sex movement in the future.
I'm just enjoying the fact that Chappelle won this round and the people trying to end his career ended up looking like sore losers. Enough "cancellations" like that one and the tactic will truly die like it should.
Love you, Freddie! I’m thankful and empathetic for all the pain and suffering you went through to get here. Wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but thankful all the same.
I always found this "cancelation isn't real because you're still talking" argument to be extremely stupid. It's roughly akin to arguing that murder must be a hoax because of the existence of attempted murder.
"SEE?! HE'S NOT DEAD!"
This is a game, and the people who do this know what they're doing. What you are seeing now is the anxiety, and squirming discomfort that comes with when the realization dawns that most people are not Professional Managerial Class upper income white collar or academic bubble inhabitants, but that disgust for this has spilled over to the majority.
A majority with political power, as Trump's victory suggests. This thinking, and this tactic, are broadly unpopular for a variety of reasons. Not merely the politics that are (usually) attached to it, but because most normies are not vindictive scumbags, who are so eager to get people they don't like or disagree with to shut up, that they'll stop at nothing to ruin their lives.
This pushback against this brand of vindictive bullshit is good, healthy, and far overdue. I'm glad it's happening. And all we can do is try to accelerate it.
The argument seems very similar to some of the stupider gripes against the COVID vaccine. “If people can are still getting breakthrough infections and now other people are needing boosters then why are you still pushing this shot?” Well, because nothing’s all or nothing in this world…
Kaepernick is an unusual case because he was shut out of a very specific profession with profoundly weird incentives. (He absolutely was blackballed and shouldn't have been, but it's also relevant that he had declined precipitously in terms of performance at that point.) But getting frozen out of the NFL actually increased his visibility and opened the door to different kinds of sponsorships and all manner of interesting new career paths.
But I'm pretty sure he would rather have continued as an NFL quarterback over any of those other opportunities.
The dimension of the Kaepernick discussion that always seems to get left out is that football teams are an entertainment product. Whatever team he joined would be in the spotlight constantly for non-football reasons and would earn a politicized brand that possibly alienated a lot of its fanbase. I don't see why any team would willingly put itself in that spot for a replacement level QB.
In a world where he's just a cog that goes into the football optimization machine, some of the people running the machine might have made a mistake. But in this world they're selling a TV show and at the time I don't think he proved himself to be a popular character.
Chrissy Teigen got canceled over behavior, not politics, but it’s still widely considered a cancellation. For me, cancel culture is when someone is declared “bad,” and their own people (their allies and partners) immediately cease to associate with them. And making amends (apologizing, etc) doesn’t matter.
I strongly disagree. It marks a difference in social treatment that is essentially unlike in kind to how most transgressions would traditionally be handled. Cancel culture is at play when a person's intrinsic character is on trial, rather than their behavior.
For those who think attempts to cancel the rich and famous can't be brutal and scarring, watch the Dixie Chicks documentary "Shut Up and Sing."
Great documentary, and as much as I enjoy their earlier work -- no doubt fueled in part by college-era nostalgia -- that film and their 2006 album are much more emotionally rich than I was prepared for at the time. (The record, like so many of the CD era, would benefit from being about 15 minutes shorter, but oh well.)
To my mind, what makes a cancellation is the all-encompassing nature of the thing and the unusually outsized and inorganic consequences. The lack of a pathway to redemption makes it a cancellation. The transgression (whether real or perceived) is not actually treated as the kind of behavioral transgression that all of us will, at some point, to varying degrees, make in life. It is treated, instead, as the *worst* kind of transgression, one which isn't really a transgression at all, so much as it is a revelation that one possesses an irredeemably broken character. The way the thing is treated as a fundamental and ineradicable stain on the person as a human being -- rendering a judgment of the transgressor as being so permanently unfit for society that a path of reintegration shouldn't even be offered -- is what makes it a cancellation.
[Deleted and reposted, for the sake of elaboration.]
This is such a good way to put it. I agree with all of the above.
Yup, like the dude looking for his keys under the lamp
I was just going to write this. It's always the least among us that the pay the most for power flexing its muscles. I'm from the Rust Belt. That is why I was a liberal until recently (I'm now an independent - I'm so PO'd that I can no longer wholesale align with the left although I still support specific policies like reproductive rights, etc.). I believed that government should try to somewhat balance the outsized privileges of power and money through regulation and not allow the biggest players to win everything; that it should at the very least give the little guy/gal a chance at a decent life. This doesn't always mean money, either. Things like unions, OSHA, wage and tax policies, funding for education, etc. can help a great deal to provide people with opportunity. I'm afraid Obama's giveaway to the banks cured me for good in terms of believing that the left cares about the little guy.
I have not followed you very long, Freddie, and I spend zero time on Twitter so I didn't know about your cancellation. It makes me glad that I recently subscribed here. I am proud to be someone who can contribute in a small way to you becoming "uncancelled." I don't believe anyone should be cancelled—at least not the way the process is currently utilized—to destroy careers and families. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. We all have the right to ignore what we don't like (eg. white supremacists, tv shows, books) and punish where laws are broken. But I abhor vigilante/mob justice. It is anathema to a liberal democracy.
In exchange for my subscriptions, you and other writers on Substack (the usual suspects - GG, MT, BW, JM), keep me sane in a world going slowly mad. I find light, love, truthtelling and lucidity here; a variety of thoughtful viewpoints; and wonderful conversation. Thank you so much!
I think you made a mistake apologizing for the twitter shit. It sounds like you did other things outside of social media that were worthy of apology, the medication, and the soul-searching, but twitter is just a video game. Trying to hold someone responsible for something they post on twitter is the same as calling for violence against a person IRL cuz they beat you in Call of Duty. People seem to have lost sight of this fundamental ridiculousness in social media culture.
None of the current popular social media platforms are realistic enough or designed in such a way as to rise to the level of "morally the same as real life."
This is a problem because humans are, in important ways, unable to completely understand that there's another human being on the end in the same way we do when standing face to face. App makers can design their apps to help alleviate this massive problem but most don't because it cuts into their profits.
It doesn't bring out the worst in you because it's not you at all. There are so many behavior-influencing algorithms at work and that, combined with basic text being the nature of these services, means that whatever words appear are not your own, but those of an algorithmic construct that uses you to hit some keys.
We have no identity that is completely apart from the context we engage in. I don't have the stomach for it, but life in general would be much better if twitter was rendered a toxic unusable wasteland cuz everybody wouldn't stop telling everyone else to kill themselves. That behavior is actually more ethical than just posting normally and taking the platform seriously by making it more money.
I fundamentally can't agree with the premise that people aren't morally responsible for their social media behavior, but I do wholly agree with your point about not engaging with it earnestly in a way that lends it credibility and influence. That's the exact reason I don't have any social media accounts anymore. Substack comments are as close as I get, and I have no regrets. Once its hooks are thoroughly removed, social media almost never manages to look appealing frm the outside.
I don't have any social media accounts either and it's excellent.
I have been very successful in my job as a therapist at getting mentally unwell people to deactivate their social media accounts. The vast majority find that it improves their lives beyond words and never go back.
Many people haven't gotten to the level where they understand responsibility for online posts isn't the same as responsibility for IRL actions. Until our societies advance to that level of understanding or we get 100% accurate VR, ignoring social media platforms entirely is the best way to go IMO.
Twitter could maybe make a lot of fundamental changes in order to rise to the level where people have responsibility for what they say on it. It's not even close currently, however.
The reason I became a subscriber was because I thought Freddie’s pieces on that were such a beautiful exploration of guilt. I also think he’s way too hard on himself about what happened. If that’s necessary for his well-being, I certainly support that. But I think the problem is that he’s a good person and thus feels guilty about what is, frankly, not that outside the boundaries for Twitter. The shit that Jesse Singal deals with on that platform everyday seems equally heinous. There seems to be a fundamental unfairness that the person who pays the price for it is the person capable of realizing it’s wrong.
His apology and behavior in response to his difficult period have been exemplary IMO. I completely agree with you.
"[...] the person who pays the price for it is the person capable of realizing it’s wrong."
This is brutally true, particularly in relation to the internet, but also more generally. It is a depressing fact that a person with a well-developed conscience is at a disadvantage, because it provides constraints on their behavior that many of their antagonists won't similarly have. It can occasionally be a benefit, when it makes the conscience-haver more sympathetic to observers, but too often, it's effectively a liability.
I find this reality maddening, but I can't deny that it is, in fact, reality. Unfortunately, I'm not sure where that leaves those of us who refuse to adapt to it by letting the ends always justify the means. ...fucked, maybe. But I hope not. Misanthropic as I can be, at times, I seem to have an inexhaustible conviction that humanity may yet surprise me.
Funny you mention canceling. If it wasn't a Short week I'd be salivating for you to tear apart the recent Michael Hobbes' article, which had me in a fit of rage like nothing since the Harper's Letter reaction. But take your time. We'll be around.
I looked into his Twitter a bit. He regularly sneers at Michelle Goldberg as the NYT's "Woke Panic Reporter."
And this is a common pattern I see with Woke Twitter. Their worldview is practically hegemonic in national media, yet they go into a pants-shitting rage over the occasional woke-skeptical piece as if the Barbarians are at the gates ready to invade. They have power but like to pretend they don't. It's so bizarre.
As Freddie points out regularly, they have the trappings of power (institutions governing symbolism and culture) without having the corresponding actual real world power. If they did then they would actually materially help disadvantaged groups en masse.
Oh, I think "dogshit" works. But I'm not a particularly classy gal. ; )
Link? (I have never heard of Michael Hobbes ...)
Seems like a garden-variety defense of wokeism to me. You can find the same in the NYT or WaPo or LATimes any day of the week.
This piece is so moronic that it isn't even worthy of Freddie's time IMO
I remember Ezra Klien making this point that cancelling doesn't hurt anybody to Sam Harris when those two sparred over Harris interviewing Charles Murray. At the time I followed the IDW, I would after that read about the awful history of IQ tests in the US and discover Michael Brooks and MR and stopped listening to Harris. But Harris had a point that a) he certainly felt the impact of the criticism he was receiving, and b) he had avoided interviewing Charlies Murray. Now maybe that's good. But to your point, cancelling clearly does work. Al Franken and Louis CK are two examples that come to mind. As does Cosby...so in some cases it's a good thing.
I'm not sure I'd characterize the rightful removal of sexual abusers from public life as "cancelling"
Were they convicted in a court of law?
IMO it was probably correct to Exile Cosby and Louis CK...but Franken's cancelation was a sad joke by sore losers.
Do courts of law often do justice for victims of sexual assault? I wish they did and have fought for such reforms for a long time, but I don't blame women for taking justice into their own hands, frankly.
Agree re: Franken, that was ridiculous.
I agree on Cosby and Spacey and Weinstein. I've gone back and forth about Louis. But where's the line? Who draws it? What about Aziz?
And what about a figure like Charles Murray and his bell curve? I've never read it but have heard the case of how racist it is. Is Harris ok to interview him?
Publicizing the case of Aziz was a very clever move by cultural elites to limit the scope of metoo discourse. They wanted to make it clear that the range of unacceptable behavior was Weinstein at one end and Aziz at the other. It would have been catastrophic in their view if meetoo's focus had shifted from helping the right kind of women to helping women in general.
Cultural elites? I'm pretty sure it was a bunch of barely-twentysomethings running the site that published the Aziz story. To me, it indicates more of a generational gap than anything - these are kids who grew up on campuses that have taken what ought to be legal matters into their own kangaroo courts; I'm not so surprised that someone growing up in that era would want revenge.
You should read it and decide for yourself:
http://pombo.free.fr/herrnsteinmurray1994.pdf
Another consideration is that, as cancellation has developed as a strategy, counter-cancellation tools have emerged to deal with it. As more people are canceled out of the progressive mainstream, it becomes easier and easier to make a go of things as part of a new (but rapidly growing) group of "canceled" intellectuals.
Substack being a fine example of this. It's garnered the reputation as some kind of right-wing coterie. First of all: I wish. Second of all: that would surely give credence to the idea that people on the right are canceled more often. It's survivor bias, same with Rumble. There are plenty of people from the left on these alternative platforms, but the mainstream, liberal left has near-total control of legacy platforms such as Twitter, not to mention broadcast and print media, so they don't need these counter-cancelation tools.
Which still isn't great. I don't want to fall into an echo chamber of the cancelled, any more than an echo chamber of the woke. And Substack is a poor substitute for having the resources of a real journalistic organization.
"And Substack is a poor substitute for having the resources of a real journalistic organization."
Color me unconvinced. The supposed fact-checkers at legacy organizations like the AP and Reuters are a self-parody. Glenn Greenwald - one guy with a laptop - did a far better job on the Congressional hearings on social media earlier this year than the entire prestige press put together. There are crowdfunded local journalists covering local beats better than the local TV channel has ever done - not many of them, but there are some. The correlation between "having a ton of money and an org chart and a shiny building" and "doing careful, meticulous journalism" seems to me practically non-existent.
I've often seen the claim "de-platforming works."
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-bans-work
https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/06/deplatforming-works-this-new-data-on-trump-tweets-shows/
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/twitter-facebook-free-speech/
Which, if true, is exactly why it's bad. It's like saying "Totalitarianism works! Disobedience to the Party is down 90%!"
Of course, these guys aren't honest totalitarians. That's why the rhetoric is self-contradictory. The cancelers want to believe that they are justified because they are in the position of weakness. But the very effectiveness of their strategy gives the lie to the claim -- they are actually in a position of astonishing strength. They just can't admit it.
De-platforming can work against individuals, on a short time scale, while still doing nothing to further the political goals of the totalitarians doing the canceling - usually the reverse, by undermining their credibility and provoking backlash.
People defend policies on their weakness all the time. Freddie has done so himself on the usage of CRT in schools. I also hear it constantly in the immigration debate - that people aren't really using the asylum laws, that people aren't really using the remain-in-country laws. In all cases it's obfuscation. And why not? It works depending on the circumstance. The old misattributed quote: "When I am weaker than You, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles." When I can't cancel you, it's imperative that I can. When I can, not only did I cancel you, but I didn't do it and there's no such thing as cancelling anyway. This is a distillation of power and doesn't require consistency nor explanation.
My favorite example:
>On Dec. 2, 2002, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld signed a memorandum authorizing interrogation techniques against detainees at Guantanamo that the current [2011] President of the United States, Barack Obama, has described as "torture."
In a handwritten notation he scrawled at the bottom of the memo, Rumsfeld wrote, "I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?"
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rumsfeld-on-detainees-i-s_b_189833
So: torture isn't all that unpleasant, so it's OK! But it also works!
"They get to stand! The Pentagon wouldn't buy me a standing desk! They don't know how good they have it!"
So I mostly agree with this at its core (that is, that cancelation more often than not harms vulnerable people and fails to do much at all to the powerful), but I'd also note that you don't see much of Alex Jones or Milo Yiannopolous these days.
Nor the last President of the United States.
There is a very good chance he will also be the next President of the United States, so that seems like very weak tea.
I disagree on his chances but I take your point. It wouldn't be quite in the spirit of things to lump him in with the powerless. (Although I know he fundraises off that image.)
Why so confident? Biden won 81 million votes - 51.3%. He's the most popular President of all time.
I don't know. Private companies proved that they have the ability to effectively remove a sitting President from the de facto public square. That strikes me as a pretty big win for canceling against the powerful, even if he later manages to whistlestop his way to electoral victory.
Twitter is not the 'public square,' de facto or otherwise. It is a video game.
It was a minor but non-trivial factor in Trump's 2016 victory, less because it moved the needle towards him but because the Democratic Party's digital obsession was so grotesque they played into his hands. (Recall Hillary releasing, nationwide, a video about a 'talking frog'.) I think online people like us do tend to overstate the importance of Twitter so I don't disregard the thrust of your point, but in specific cases like this it doesn't work. Trump and Twitter were synonymous. His visibility and fundraising ability absolutely have declined since his banning. This isn't to say he's some meek and powerless martyr, but you can't say it's just a game.
The Trump - twitter debacle was one of the final straws that caused me to write social media off forever. It is fundamentally a video game but people can decide to treat it like it's real. Their failure to follow their own guidelines and ban Trump years before they did showed with great finality that it's a mistake to pretend that particular video game should have any impact on reality.
Eh. It's where the news gets its news. I agree that on its own it is vapid and meaningless, but when mainstream journalism treats it as reality, it has an extraordinary effect on whose ideas get seen and discussed. That's not a comment on whether it SHOULD be the public square, but I don't think it makes sense to deny its influence on journalism, and therefore public opinion.
(That's not to say that there isn't a whole world of opinion outside of social media. But if you want to influence people today, where do you go? Do you literally go to the town square and pass out leaflets? My guess is no.)
This is why journalism is completely worthless these days: anyone who has an active twitter account is bound to be wrong the vast majority of the time, and journalists fit that bill.
Greenwald seems to be a weird exception, but he also seems to understand that twitter's only legitimate purpose is for trolling and he's really good at that.
I have a sneaking suspicion Trump's Republican "allies" are perfectly happy to keep Trump, the man, out of the spotlight even as the use Trump, the icon, as best they can.
In their position, I'd certainly rather have someone like Christopher Rufo managing the Message than Trump.
I share your view completely. Which is to say you are right :)
Milo was canceled by the right, not the left, who had attempted to cancel him for years and failed.
Absolutely true, but it still worked.
Chappelle put it best recently:
"I don't give a fuck cuz twitter's not a real place!"
But the flim festivals that cancelled showings of his documentary are real.
I'm not getting the impression that he really gives a damn.
Which brings us back to the point about how it doesn't work on the rich and powerful.
I was more getting at the idea that even people who oppose cancel culture make the mistake of thinking that things posted on social media are legitimate and the same as saying something IRL.
Twitter is a video game and Chappelle gets it. Do you understand that it's a video game, or do you empower the cancellers by pretending twitter is real?
I feel a special pity for those whose jobs require them to take social media seriously. The rest of us can and should ignore it.
Saying it's a video game doesn't mean anything in particular. People get paid to play actual video games, they have emotional reactions to them, and they spend time on them, so even video games aren't meaningless the way you assert they are. It's probably healthy not to take social media too seriously, but people do. Saying they shouldn't doesn't change that. People who don't empower the cancelers can still lose their jobs or get harassed. As you said, a non-trivial number of people have jobs in social media. So I see what you're getting at, but I think it's incorrect.
I'm not saying video games are meaningless. I am saying it's neurotic to be unable to separate video games (including social media) from reality.
It generates a whole lot of gravity for "not a real place," significantly distorting public discourse. It's not alone (or novel) in doing so, but that doesn't rob it of its influence.
I agree. The best I can do is point out that twitter users are responsible for cancel culture simply by being twitter users who have goals other than ruining the platform. You can use twitter or you can credibly oppose cancel culture, but you can't do both.
Cancellation also works on the rich and famous:
>Now playing at your local theater: probably not Dave Chappelle’s documentary, which the comedian says is being dropped by film distributors after his recent Netflix comedy special sparked a fight with transgender activists.
>The documentary, which chronicles the comic’s efforts to hold standup shows during the pandemic in his neighbor’s Ohio cornfield, has seen its invitations to film festivals rescinded, according to a video clip he posted to Instagram.
...
>The outspoken comic said the documentary had scored invitations to major film festivals across the country, but now “nobody will touch this film.”
https://nypost.com/2021/10/26/dave-chappelle-doc-pulled-by-distributors-amid-controversy/
After seeing what happens to a rich and famous Black man who satirizes the anti-sex movement, will any comedian ever dare to do so again?
And it took only a ridiculously small and pathetic protest at Netflix to get Chappelle cancelled:
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/so-whats-the-strategy-here-exactly
He's not canceled at all. Who cares about film festivals? The Closer has been viewed millions of times and Netflix will continue to work with Dave Chapelle. The 'protests' the media spent a week hyping up against him were pathetically small.
"He's not canceled at all. Who cares about film festivals?"
I'm sure I read an article about this approach - defending cancelation based on the idea that it doesn't work. Hold on, I'll dig up the link...
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/short-week-my-cancelation-was-quite
If you could guarantee that cancellation would only ever take place against the rich and powerful, and wouldn't ultimately trickle down to those who - in your view - might actually be impacted, this would be a convincing argument. But instead the default mode of activism among the online Left is cancellation. You can't be even slightly surprised when, having failed to completely banish Chappelle from public life, people eager to claim a scalp go for a softer target. To claim, as you do, that this was all somehow to Chappelle's benefit is only going to exacerbate that trend. Your kind benediction, that of giving someone on the wrong path the time to consider their transgressions... how is that going to ensure anything other than constant, scattergun cancellation? It's for their own good, after all.
I think you're assuming a position I haven't taken at all.
Cancelation is a shitty tactic that, as Freddie has previously stated, cannot bring about systemic change. People who believe that cancelation is a just tactic are not actually leftists at all, just performative losers attempting to acquire social currency.
I am enjoying how bad these losers are looking right now in light of their failure to end Chappelle's career, which was obviously their goal.
I was replying to KT, not to you, in this specific post.
I'm not defending cancelation I'm saying it obviously didn't work in this case.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/cancel-culture-takes-a-big-l-264
"He's not canceled at all."
"[Cancelation] didn't work on this case."
If you're not defending it, your argument is still based on the inefficacy of the tactic.
"What actually happened was the general public gave an almost unanimous thumbs-up to the show, and the essentially universal condemnation of these media neurotics fell flat as Netflix — whose revenues jumped to $7.4 billion in the third quarter of this year — blew off demands to cancel the show. The press tried to hype a crisis into existence and failed, that’s all."
I've demonstrated that the tactic specifically failed in this instance. It has nothing to do with the general efficacy of the tactic or lack thereof.
Failed in what sense, that he's still alive and still has a career? Yeah, obviously. As Freddie correctly says, the more powerful you are, the more you can withstand it. But he's obviously faced some minor consequences. So, the tactic works.
The tactics did not totally fail. A handful of Netflix employees did get an unreasonable amount of press that is used to shame Chapelle and limit his future options. There is an impact, even if it’s not the total cancellation from Netflix that they are going for. Chapelle will be fine but I don’t think even rich folks particularly enjoy a public shaming. Who does???
The point of cancelation is not ONLY to subdue the canceled, but ALSO to send a chilling message to the rest of the world.
If you are a comedian with not as many bucks in the bank as Chappelle, how many trans jokes will you make now?
I guess you could say that cancellation punches down.
LOL!
Personally the controversy encourage me to watch Chapelle for the first time. The fact that he was condemned as being homophobic made me uninterested in listening to him in the past. I am bisexual and just don’t have time for that shit.
But I am always curious to here from people who’s ideas are so dangerous that there is a movement to censor them.
I found his show to be quite funny and not homophobic at all. I am still probably not going to listen to his prior work, but I will consider it.
I had the opposite reaction. I remember a year-ish ago the Geisel estate "cancelled" some obscure Dr. Seuss books for racism or whatever, and sales of the non-obscure books skyrocketed. When I saw this Chapelle shit, I assumed that Netflix expected the controversy, protests, etc and knew that they would ultimately boost their profile. I saw it as cynical free press, so I'm staying away.
Maybe that's a bit too tin-foil hat, but it seems plausible to me.
It's a well-worn tactic on the Right. "Grr, this brave patriot's too spicy for the left! Watch this video before he gets Cancelled by Big Tech and the Liberal Media! Rawr! You won't believe his takes on Taiwan! Don't let the censors win!" 30 minutes of Heritage Foundation boilerplate follows.
I remember reading Freakonomics in high school, about a this "rogue" economist. Then I got a degree in economics and learned that Stephen Levitt is pretty popular and mainstream.
And who will ever forget the religious fundamentalist tambourine girl at Chapelle protest:
https://twitter.com/DouglasKMurray/status/1451671397068152836
Out of interest, when you write at this length, do you find you have to consciously cut out parts of your argument or do you just not look for extra depths? Would a longer article have had this ending somewhere in the first third, or would it have reached the same end by a longer path? Or are there long and short subjects?
Hard to say. I'm enjoying it but I'm glad it's just one week. (I will try and write the occasional shorty in the future though.) I am obviously more parsimonious and definitely do choose the topics carefully. I find it's more of a staging area for comment conversation this way, which in particular works well for tomorrow morning's post, which is a hypothetical. But I'm not sure how these would be different otherwise.
Eventually, your innate graphomania will take the wheel once again, and I, for one, have no complaints.
FWIW, I am also glad it's only a week. Your writing never comes across to me as poorly edited or needlessly wordy, so it's all enjoyable to read, length be damned. I don't know who these complainants are, but they're cancelled, in my book!
Speaking of a staging area for comments -- alongside Astral Codex Ten, your comments section is by far my favorite on Substack. I've thought, for a while now, that an "open thread" feature similar to ACX's might be really nice here too. Just a thought.
ACX tends to have decent comments but substack's comment system is such that the volume of comments renders it nigh unusable.
I gave the ACX discord (the one Scott links to on the front page) a try, but it turns out it's administered by a sad loser who bans people for winning arguments against him. Scott never visits at all and the philosophy there has nothing to do with Scott's in practice.
Maybe Freddie should start a discord?
The fact that cancellation doesn't work against the rich and powerful is a great point. Trump is a perfect example of this. He also couldn't be shamed out of public life because he has no shame, as Louis Theroux said.
As an old-school lefty from a union family, it truly sickens me to see left-liberal people smugly tag the employer of someone they don't like in a tweet, hoping to get them fired. The world has been dragged very far from where it should be.
If the hassle keeps Chappelle from saying his piece in the future, the cancellation worked. It will definitely keep other, less wealthy and powerful, artists from speaking their minds, self-censoring to avoid the trouble. Is the point to make the offender literally disappear or to control the conversation? I'd say the latter, and it seems to be working.
This is the chilling effect which was an important concept in liberal free speech doctrine up until a few years ago.
Even such mainstream liberals who still hold it as a valid concept only apply it in cases that they agree with, such as here:
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/publications/the-concept-of-chilling-effect
The chilling effect is not opposed because it's a chilling effect, but because it might interfere with democracy. Well, you may say, there's no problem there - democracy is a good thing after all. Sure, it is. Now wait until democracy is more narrowly defined. Now an opposition to the chilling effect doesn't protect your view of democracy. Hungary is a private country and can chill what they want. Many such cases!
Yes, it is working. Even on Chappelle: it seems to me that there is no question that he will have fewer opportunities going forward. And so maybe he'll avoid satirizing the anti-sex movement in the future.
I'm just enjoying the fact that Chappelle won this round and the people trying to end his career ended up looking like sore losers. Enough "cancellations" like that one and the tactic will truly die like it should.
Love you, Freddie! I’m thankful and empathetic for all the pain and suffering you went through to get here. Wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but thankful all the same.
I always found this "cancelation isn't real because you're still talking" argument to be extremely stupid. It's roughly akin to arguing that murder must be a hoax because of the existence of attempted murder.
"SEE?! HE'S NOT DEAD!"
This is a game, and the people who do this know what they're doing. What you are seeing now is the anxiety, and squirming discomfort that comes with when the realization dawns that most people are not Professional Managerial Class upper income white collar or academic bubble inhabitants, but that disgust for this has spilled over to the majority.
A majority with political power, as Trump's victory suggests. This thinking, and this tactic, are broadly unpopular for a variety of reasons. Not merely the politics that are (usually) attached to it, but because most normies are not vindictive scumbags, who are so eager to get people they don't like or disagree with to shut up, that they'll stop at nothing to ruin their lives.
This pushback against this brand of vindictive bullshit is good, healthy, and far overdue. I'm glad it's happening. And all we can do is try to accelerate it.
/sarc Right? Just checking. ;-)
The argument seems very similar to some of the stupider gripes against the COVID vaccine. “If people can are still getting breakthrough infections and now other people are needing boosters then why are you still pushing this shot?” Well, because nothing’s all or nothing in this world…