Cancel Culture is Stupid and You're Stupid for Believing in it

Cancel culture is stupid and you’re stupid for believing in it. Unless you’re a wealthy famous person or a corporation, this doesn’t really affect you at all, and if you think either of these groups cares about people like you and me, then reapply part two of the first statement. The thought that any of this matters at all is bogglingly idiotic and you should calm the fuck down and reflect on why you’re wasting your time getting hot and sweaty over it.

J.K Rowling is stupid too, and her opinions are bad, and as a result she is getting yelled at on the Internet. People have been saying stupid things and getting yelled at over them on the internet for a long time, but apparently in the case of J.K Rowling it’s some kind of crisis of free speech. This only applies to J.K Rowling of course, or Milo Yianoppolis getting banned for being odious, or @Glinner or whoever. It does not of course, apply to you or me; we plebeians are expected to simply fight down here in the mud. Down here in the world of the working class, if you say [Stalin was good actually] or slag off a minority (because you're an asshole) you get yelled at and that’s just how the internet works. It is only when a big name steps into the public discourse with the finesse and complexity of a drunk auntie at a Christmas gathering, and is told that they’re being a huge loser, that we are apparently in a crisis of free speech.

This crisis of course is entirely to be attributed to some vague group of illiberal activists, who, with the big scary tool of Cancel Culture, are busy tweeting mean things and cancelling people which means… uhhh… anyway, it’s bad, apparently. But what under no circumstances should we do is point out that, for example, the Twitter algorithm is designed to promote engagement at all costs, which often means dangling opponents shittest tweets in front of each other like pieces of red meat. Nobody should point out that the entire purpose of this is to make profits and sell adverts, because then we’d have to ask questions like ‘should a handful of private companies have gigantic power to control the public discourse’, or ‘should we have mechanisms to hold massive companies publicly accountable’ or ‘should companies be collectively owned by normal people instead by a handful of weird billionaire nerds and a gaggle of evil bloodsucking investment bankers’ or ‘is Peter Thiele actually a vampire and should we send an army to his lair to destroy him?’

Of course, I am being terrible disingenuous here. It is not just Twitter where the idiotic spectre of Cancel Culture hangs out. Tech media companies such as Netflix have taken the steps of removing material apparently because they're scared that they might hurt the feelings of the snowflake avocado toast generation. We are again asked to believe that episodes of 30 Rock with blackface, and the life work of Chris Lilly have been taken down because the shadowy, vaguely defined cabal of illiberal Cancel Culture activists have been successful at their goal of destroying all challenging discourse. We are asked to believe this and you probably do. Because you’re stupid.

In fact, there is another possibility; that Netflix has only one agenda; making money, and has no other moral convictions. Because it is run in very large part by Capitalist monsters who have very little familiarity with – shudder – ‘normal people’, they have in fact, no idea what must be done to keep the normals appeased and giving them $6 a week. So when they develop a vague awareness that some kind of important social change is taking place, it's not shocking that they stumble around and haphazardly, arbitrarily apply some kind of action. Reasonable people can disagree on whether this was a good choice, but at the end of the day, we should never lose sight of the fact that it's a cynical exercise in optics. After all, if Netflix cared about ethical behaviour, they'd pay their damn tax.

Again, this abrupt change in programming is probably a little bit cringeworthy (and certainly frustrating for people who need to watch the fat naked black lady fighting the fat naked white lady sketch from Little Britain in order to sleep at night). But is it substantial? Significant? Important? Noteworthy? A crisis? For CEOs and celebrities, sure. But for the rest of us? Why do you care? Just do what the rest of us do when Netflix takes stuff down, and torrent it.

Again, if there are questions here, surely they are not so much about these imaginary illiberal Cancel Culture activists, and far more about why we allow corporations and the people who own them to accumulate massive power controlling the limits of discourse and the material conditions of their employees.

If you’ve been paying attention to the news media, you know that not only have the Cancel Culture death squad killed Chris Lilly, J.K Rowling, Little Britain, @Glinner, Jeffery Star, 30 Rock, Louise CK and Elon Musk, they’ve also made Alison Brie of Bojack Horseman apologise for voicing a Vietnamese American character. Of course, they could not actually ‘Cancel’ Bojack Horseman because Bojack Horseman was already literally cancelled, not long after animators unionised. Somehow, shows that are literally cancelled are outside the purview of Cancel Culture however, and the power of massive corporations to literally cancel things because they affect the bottom line in ways unrelated to the public discourse, is good actually, or something.

Likewise, sure, it sucks when people lose their jobs because they shot their mouth off on Facebook. But is that worse than when they lose their job for starting a Union? Or for no reason? Because they wouldn't stay silent over sexual harassment? Because they get sick and need time to recover? Nobody should be in the position of having to constantly fear for their ability to put food on the table, but if this has only because an issue for you since you read an article about some guy who was fired for sharing Hitler memes, then I'm sorry but you have absolute worms for brains. The precarious and dangerous position of working class people is a real issue, but it predates Cancel Culture by a couple of hundred years.  

It doesn’t take too much scratching at the surface to reveal the true villains behind the mask of cancel culture at any point. Where companies such as Disney or Simon and Schuster have made the choice of ‘cancelling’ problematic elements, it’s been purely a financial calculation. Their power to control the public discourse is built on their massive, under-regulated power, and the undemocratic operation of a money-making machine. Where individuals are concerned, we should roll our eyes even harder – J. K Rowling, cancelled though she may apparently be, is still sitting in an armchair, pathologically incapable of logging off Twitter. She has yet to be dragged off to the Corbynist re-education centre by the Transgender Gestapo. And where Youtube personalities have been concerned, we have either seen figures engage in a self-directed process of self-reflection (Jenna Marbles) or engage in a clumsy PR exercise (Jeffery Star) or just keep going like a steam train (That Pewdipie keeps making content despite having enough of an association with White Nationalism to be memed on immediately before a massacre of Muslim people, should answer any questions you have about whether Cancel Culture has some kind of almighty power to destroy careers).

And statues and mosaics, and paintings… I’m not going to pretend like every discussion about public space in a University Campus or town square is filled with merit, but it’s possibly not insane that the public is itself involved in conversations about how public space functions, who it celebrates, whose needs are reflected and so on. Don’t pretend like you are a lifelong statue nerd. As always people are sometimes annoying and sometimes have bad opinions, but a crisis it is not. 

Look; people have had stupid takes on culture since the dawn of time. If you want to yell at strangers for being wrong on the internet, go ahead; it’s good for the soul. If you’re a leftist and you want to review the effectiveness of your tactics, that’s good obviously, but stop listening to liberals and TERFs. And if you want to complain that people have stupid takes, or whatever, go with God. But I beg you, please engage your brain a little, and consider whether this constitutes a crisis of free speech that threatens the very fabric of public discourse. And consider whether a bunch of weird nerds on the internet with Garfield avatars are more of a threat to free speech than the continuing concentration of wealth into the hands of a couple of companies and fuckwits who own almost every tech and media platform on Earth.