- Hello hello my dears, welcome back.
New background for today!
I have been getting ready to stream this summer.
I'm really excited
'cause I've really missed streaming.
So that's gonna happen.
I'll put some links down below.
So believe me when I say
that part of me cringes at even making this video.
Apparently there are still people, 2021
who think that cancel culture doesn't exist?
People I know and love.
I'm like, do we live on this same planet?
So I kind of organized my thoughts
and today I want to talk about five big problems
that I have with cancel culture
from a more feminist/humanist perspective.
The New York Times defines cancellation
as an attack on someone's employment and reputation
by a determined collective of critics.
Now, I like this definition for two reasons.
One is that, economics, cash money, is central
to the cancellation phenomenon.
Canceling is an attempt to minimize someone's power
and influence in society.
Second, I like the "determined collective of critics." [chuckles] Oh boy.
Let's just call it what it is, okay?
A frothy social media mob.
Let me start with where I think
most people across the cancel culture spectrum would agree.
I think most good folks would agree
that there should be consequences
when someone makes a serious moral error;
hate crimes, sex abuse, vile abuses of power.
Not that complicated!
Criminals should be charged,
people who abuse their power shouldn't be able to.
I also think most reasonable folks would agree
that there is a certain type of person now
who likes to cry "OMG cancel culture!"
every time they're criticized.
Like this dude who blamed cancel culture
when his horse failed a doping test.
- Pretty harsh.
It was like a cancel culture kind of thing.
So they're reviewing it.
- Hey, guy, I don't think cancel culture
made you drug your horse.
Lastly, I think most reasonable people would agree
that nobody is entitled to praise or being liked
or having followers or whatever.
Being criticized, losing friends, losing fans,
yeah, it sucks,
but...nobody owes you anything.
Hopefully that makes it pretty clear
what I'm specifically talking about here.
Let's get on to my five big problems.
The first is that in most cases,
cancel culture does not offer proportional consequences.
It targets every person, every context, every situation
with the exact same punishment.
That means that a lot of the time
it ends up being overly punitive,
and it leaves no room for people to learn and grow.
I mean, are we talking about a sexual abuser?
Well, yeah, they should be canceled,
they should lose their job,
they should go to jail.
Do not pass go,
do not collect $200.
But what about...a data analyst
who tweets a Princeton study
that found that riots decrease support for Democrats?
Should he have lost his job for tweeting that?
'Cause he did.
Okay, what about an immigrant baker
whose daughter tweeted something racist nine years ago?
Should he then lose his lease
and all of his distributor contracts?
Because he did.
And all 50 plus of his employees,
people of color and immigrants, all lost their livelihood.
What about a high schooler
who says the N word (with an A) on Snapchat
while bragging about getting her driver's license?
Should she be barred from getting a college education?
Because she was.
What about an employee at San Diego Electric,
a Mexican-American, no less,
who had his hand hanging out the window in a suspicious way?
Should people take a picture of that post it on Twitter
and demand he be fired?
Because they did,
and he was fired.
What about a pharmacy PhD student
who's tweeting her thoughts and ideas about sexuality
on her personal social media?
Should she be put under investigation
and face expulsion from her university?
Because she is.
- Initially it was just to my knowledge
an Instagram posts that had sort of set things off.
I asked them okay,
well, where in the policy does it say
I violated any of the rules?
No response to those questions.
Had another meeting,
and then they said they wanted to dismiss me
from the program.
- Unfortunately, there are thousands of situations like this
popping up all over the country right now.
We can see an uptick in lawsuits.
Watchdog non-profits are sounding the alarm.
Pretending that this isn't happening
or that ALL of these people must have deserved it,
to me that seems a bit like an ostrich
putting their head in the sand at this point.
And look, I get it.
The people in these cancellation scenarios
aren't always the most sympathetic victims.
It's not fun to defend someone who has made a mistake, maybe...
especially vile mistakes.
But the alternative and what's happening now is that,
if we don't make room
to address different situations fairly and proportionally,
we end up treating this guy
you know, this immigrant baker
the same as we treat serious criminals!
And that's an injustice too.
Not to mention by the way,
most people don't think about these "average Joe" targets
of an outrage cycle ever again.
They don't see the effects months or years
after the mob has moved on.
But it's real.
It's funny, a lot of these folks defending it
want to talk about mental health on social media.
Like...hello!
The root of this problem, I think,
is that cancel culture is really about black and white thinking.
It's about seeing people as all good or all bad
when everybody in reality, all of us,
even these cancelers, right?
They are capable of both.
We all are capable of both.
I'm gonna let Obama take the wheel on this one.
- Yeah, this idea of purity,
and you're always politically woke and all that stuff,
you should get over that quickly.
The world is messy.
There are ambiguities.
There is this sense sometimes
of the way of me making change
is to be as judgmental as possible about other people.
And that's enough,
I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself.
- My second bone to pick is that cancel culture
ends up targeting people with no real power in society.
The canceling phenomenon has been on the internet
for as long as I can remember.
It was very popular on Tumblr,
but it really went mainstream,
I think, with #MeToo.
That is when a lot of people got together
to use the internet
to really take down some dangerous and terrible people.
I mean, Harvey Weinstein
being kind of the pinnacle of that, right?
But we are now eight years post-#MeToo.
And in that time,
I think that this phenomenon has really spiraled
out of control.
Maybe eight or nine out of 10 of the internet cancellations
that I observe,
do not target actually dangerous and powerful people.
It targets regular people, for relatively minor mistakes
or even just a questionable opinion.
And when I say regular people,
I mean people with no real money in the bank,
no connections, no upward mobility in society.
Something that I don't think most people
who defend cancel culture understand
is that the majority of cancellations
do not make national headlines.
They don't even make local headlines,
which means they are largely unseen by the public.
And maybe that's the problem!
Like the invisibility of these average Joe cancellations,
allows people to defend it
because they only see these more extreme scenarios,
or to pretend like it doesn't exist.
- Here are some people who have supposedly been canceled.
Kanye West, not canceled.
That n* is doing Sunday service every Sunday.
Chris Brown, not canceled.
I can leave this building right now
and Chris Brown will be dancing in front of it.
Dave Chappelle, definitely not canceled.
- Notice how he's only talking about A-listers.
My problem with that is, he's right.
Super powerful people DON'T suffer from cancel culture.
Now that doesn't mean
that therefore cancel culture doesn't exist!
It just means that cancel culture
affects people more severely
the less power they have.
I mean, you wanna go there,
war criminals, billionaires who exploit their workers,
bank and pharmaceutical and insurance tycoons.
These people don't have a Twitter
and most of us don't know them by name.
They can't be touched,
and they certainly can't be canceled.
That alone makes cancel culture a questionable method
for achieving justice.
All right, number three.
I don't hear this one super often
but I think it's really important.
Cancel culture is pro-surveillance and anti-worker.
Let's think about how cancel culture redistributes power.
On the upside,
there is power in using our voices
to collectively call out injustices
and exploitation on social media.
But the punitive method of cancel culture
also invites corporations and employers,
universities, big tech, landlords,
you know, these big powerful entities
to monitor our personal social media
and our political beliefs
if we want to talk about them.
In The United States,
a company can fire people for pretty much any reason
beside their race, sex, sexual orientation,
things like that.
I mean, cancel culture practically begs
for corporate surveillance,
because that's precisely why it works!
Especially on workers that don't have a lot of leverage.
To me, that's making a deal with the devil.
My fourth problem is that,
cancel culture centers activism that feels good
over activism that does good.
I think on some level,
even the most rabid cancel culture supporters
know that this is not always right.
They know it goes too far sometimes.
So what if it goes too far a lot of the time?
Most of the time? Half the time?
How many unjust cases are acceptable?
Unfortunately, I think this stuff is mostly about feelings.
It makes us feel powerful
to make martyrs of people whose lives we CAN destroy.
We turn them into symbols of bigger injustices.
And in making an example out of them,
we tell ourselves that that injustice is being defeated.
But in reality, nothing has really changed.
In the world we live in,
justice is rare, and it's hard won,
and it's very incremental.
But cancel culture offers justice
that is immediate and easy,
and happens every day.
Just go on Twitter!
When injustice is baked into the system,
people get frustrated
and it feels good to let someone have it.
And that...I do get.
You know, most of us have done it.
We're just human.
And for people who care about injustice,
when you see these things happen all the time,
you see the same type of people never held accountable,
always getting away with it,
you get tired,
you get cynical.
But when people get too cynical,
it becomes very easy to justify
or overlook a lot of nasty behavior
because it's a means to an end.
Number five, my last critique I'll share here,
is that cancel culture creates an environment
where anxiety and self-censorship fester.
I think part of what makes people roll their eyes
about critiques of cancel culture is that
it often comes from pretty famous people,
people who don't have that much to lose.
And from one perspective,
it looks like they're complaining.
From another perspective,
it looks like they're standing up
for people who don't have that level of media attention.
I see it the second way.
It's not that surprising
that people who work in industries who are asking questions
and pushing limits
are the ones that are talking about this the most;
writers and journalists, educators and researchers,
artists, entertainers, comedians.
The prospect of losing your livelihood
for a minor slip up is real,
and it's scary,
and it's certainly enough to keep people quiet.
When the environment starts to feel so tense
that people can't speak honestly,
and candidly, when they aren't able to make mistakes
and to learn and grow
and they feel like they're walking on eggshells
and can't ask reasonable questions,
those are all red flags.
It looks like an abusive relationship to me.
I recently interviewed Arielle Scarcella on my podcast
and she was telling me about
and sending me receipts of messages
that she gets every day from LGBT YouTubers
who kind of are living their life in fear
afraid of making a mistake.
Unfortunately, I worry that this is not improving,
that it's actually getting worse
for the next generation of YouTubers,
and I feel for them.
I really think everyone needs to take a deep breath
and reflect on the culture that we're creating.
Ask ourselves how much justice is really coming out of this?
And at the very least,
because this is apparently still controversial,
we need to acknowledge that something is happening here
and make an honest attempt to understand it.
Okay, that was a nice vent.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for your eyes and your ears, my dears.
I hope you'll join me on stream
where hopefully we'll not be chatting about depressing shit
like people's lives being ruined.
But if I don't see you there,
I'll see you next time.
(upbeat music)