Did We Get The Nature of Cancel Culture Wrong?

Cancel Culture is not what we deem it to be. A more sinister cancellation process is undermining our intellectual growth.

What is Cancel Culture?

In 2020, Alan Dershowitz, an American law professor, introduced cancel culture as “the new McCarthyism of the ‘woke’ generation.”[1]

He claims that this is a culture so horrendous ending careers, destroying legacies, breaking families, and even causing suicides with no regard for due process. There would not be an opportunity to counter the often false or exaggerated allegations. He also laments two things, cancel culture and the woke generation.

Contrasting the two movements, Dershowitz wrote that McCarthyism and Stalinism employed the power of government, while cancel culture employed the power of public opinion, social media, threats of economic boycotts, and “constitutionally protected private” action.

Professor Dershowitz’s diatribe against cancel culture could have resulted from the false accusation he had to suffer from one of the underage girls used by Jeffrey Epstein. Subsequent to these accusations, some venues and media ‘canceled’ him.

There are many others who came forward to criticise the phenomenon labelled as cancel culture. Without directly referring to “cancel culture”, many people known all over the world like the journalist Fareed Zakaria, the scientists Steven Pinker and Atul Gawande, Francis Fukuyama of “The End of History Fame”, the writer Margaret Atwood, the linguist Noam Chomsky published an open letter imploring not to constrict the free exchange of information and ideas. The letter mentions the real threat to democracy posed by the powerful allies of illiberalism like Donald Trump and lamented censoriousness, spreading beyond the confines of the radical right. [3]

From the above open letter, it can be seen that Alan Dershowitz only attacked the group with “woke” ideologies. This group mainly represents a progressive, left-leaning crowd. But the open letter captures the radical right as well. Thus, it is sad that Dershowitz’s portrayal of cancel culture lacked balance. It may rather appear as a grievance about his bitter experience.

Further evolution of the definition can be seen from the following.

Merriam-Webster dictionary, based on their 2021 update, defines it with finesse. Their definition is “ the removing of support for public figures in response to their objectionable behaviour or opinions.”[2]

Boycotting or refusing to promote the work done by public figures whose acts are of questionable value are among the actions arising from such canceling. Thus, we have a broader definition not confined to “woke” opinions, or the political right or left.

Natural Selection of Ideas

In the case of ideas, too natural selection plays a role. Let us take Darwin’s dangerous idea in a shallow sense. Natural selection is about the survival of the fittest. Many opinions expressed by various people, irrespective of their popularity or power, fade away into obscurity over time if those ideas don’t hold water.

More useful ideas in synchronicity with the times survive. This is true about the flat earth vs. round earth as well as the static universe vs. expanding universe. Democracies replaced autocracies, and fascism became less ‘fashionable’. Opinions too, appear to follow evolutionary processes.

Thus, cancel culture is just a clash of views that should result in the emergence of more acceptable viewpoints. If the barrage of criticism is too much to bear, can’t we just ignore the comments in the knowledge of survival of the fittest opinions unless a mob comes to us and protests outside our homes, makes threats or physically harasses us? Then we are in the territory of legal remedies.

The Impact on The “Victims”

Even during the early days of the uproar about the cancel culture, some insightful journalists could see through the mist. Sarah Manavis, the New Statesman’s tech and digital culture writer, hit the nail on the head when she said that cancel culture was just a label for an age-old phenomenon. People may call it criticism or backlash. [4]

The key difference now is that the action mainly takes place on social media, “the great equaliser” where small people can have a stage like the people in power with access to traditional mass media. The ideas of the average person too can be heard by many.

In my opinion, Sarah Manavis was very insightful to observe

“Those who are the loudest critics of “cancel culture” are also some of the loudest defenders of “free speech” and “open debate”. [4]

This is the point that is out of reach for the intellectuals like Dershowitz. “Cancel culture” is, very often, about a form of free speech and should be treated with this in mind. Unless, of course, violence or threats are involved! Consequences of stifling it can equally affect both the right as well as the left.

The reason behind the resignation of Larry Summers as the president of Harvard seems to be a far cry from cancel culture. Dershowitz could not definitively claim in the book that Summers had to resign simply because of a campaign against him via a woke group. According to the information available on the internet, Summers had some controversies surrounding him other than his hypotheses about the better academic achievements of men over women [5]. Despite his ‘controversial’ remarks, he had the support of the majority of students, 57% [5].

The allegations against Dershowitz too faded away, as there was no consistent story from the accuser. The cancel culture thus seems to be like the opening of a bottle of Champagne, a lot of fizz and then, normality.

As the Canadian writer Sarah Hagi quoted the publisher of a book by the journalist Mark Halperin, who was once alleged of sexual misconduct, once claimed “ this guilty-until-proven-innocent cancel culture where everyone is condemned to death or to a lifetime of unemployment” [6]. Mark Halperin is not dead or condemned to unemployment but hosts “Mark Halperin’s Focus Group” on Newsmax TV [7].

Many victims of cancel culture, didn’t die or had lifetime bans. There is no doubt that they suffered a backlash and humiliation. But life moved on past the event. Even in the case of Dershowitz, he wrote two books after his book on cancel culture. He perhaps lost a few speaking opportunities.

The right-wing furore to Dylan Mulvaney’s Bud Light advertisement was not about wokeness. In her saga, she was only a public face of the transgender community that was implicitly subjected to harassment. Was the cancel culture, thus, simply a result of the ‘woke’ generation? Did the right-wing media play a role in it?

Some writers also discussed “soft totalitarianism” that stifles opposing views. It is not a secret that some religious apologists took the concept seriously from the perspective of religion. Even Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s essay “Live Not By Lies” was given a new meaning.

Let us suppose that the crawling left-wing and progressive wokeness can be cornered as totalitarianism. Then, where can we place McCarthyism that stifled many voices including the one of Robert Oppenheimer, and placed many Americans under the state’s watchful eyes? Those individuals, too suffered humiliation and financial losses. McCarthyism didn’t happen in a totalitarian state.

What about book bans, anti-abortion activism, and curtailing some people’s voting rights that also have critical consequences, more or equally problematic, than social media activism or clash of opinions? Books are banned and hence, authours are almost blacklisted. Would Solzhenitsyn consider these as totalitarian tendencies? Cannot we all agree that the same Creator made us all with many different views on purpose, and His Will through His creation should prevail?

In the Heart of It Lies Greenbacks

In many situations including those we discussed, the so-called victims of cancel culture mainly suffered, apart from humiliation and public disapproval, some financial loss. Excluding a few people like Mulvaney, many others complaining about cancel culture had been accused of something. These allegations can be outright false accusations or ones with some substance. In the end, these sudden bursts of public outcry subside. In today’s world, publicity regardless of whether it is good or bad, can be a good thing. Even the streakers get a following that a die-hard sports fan would only wish for. A corrupt politician often on the news can be more electable than a ‘clean shirt’ not known to the electorate.

Thus, the cancel culture appears as a term referring to a sudden surge of negative publicity about privileged persons without causing lasting damage to them. The substantial earning power of these people depends on the position of privilege associated with their public persona. In the end, the so-called cultural aspect boils down to dimming the prospect of monetising their public persona after a public outcry. Often, for a while. The idea of cancel culture is no more than another concept fuelled by the flow of greenbacks.

Real Cancel Culture Lurking In The Shadows!

As was discussed, the commonly accepted cancel culture can, if we are willing, be alternatively seen as a disguise for the questionable behaviours and opinions of the affluent people. The real cancel culture is far more subtle so we don’t even take notice of it and is now crawling all over us in daily life.

As soon as we start reading our news feeds or watching streaming media what we see is filtered information. Everything is based on our previous choices to read or watch. Reading about snakes in the past, causes me to receive articles about snakes in my news feed. It makes me falsely feel the abundance of snakes in the suburbs. This is true about many social media platforms.

The number of views, clicks, and other forms of engagement matters. Thus, serving us what we like matters. Let us call this content personalisation as content filtering is used for other processes such as making online child-safe. Instead of feeding ourselves, we are fed with selected information. This process cancels the information that we did not watch, did not read in the past, or didn’t arise from our network.

Part of the problem, the former American President Barack Obama says, is ‘the changing incentive structure’ for modern online platforms. Twenty years ago, Obama noted that

“the key pillars of web search were ‘comprehensiveness, relevance and speed’. But with the rise of social media, and the need to learn more about people’s behavior, in order to sell more ads, more companies are now opting for ‘personalization, engagement and speed”. [8]

Unfortunately, what we experience in our daily lives, contrary to what Obama wishes, is various media companies presenting certain types of items in our feeds algorithmically boosted on historical data about our online behaviours.

Does Content Personalisation Negatively Affect Us?

Content Personalisation can easily desensitise a person, perhaps with some predisposition, to opposing views. President Obama quoted research on the Fox viewers forced to view other services. After a month, these subjects changed the opinions they held in the past.

If, for a simplified example, a religious person, with some strong adherence to his religion in a harmless fashion, watches a streaming service, there would be a feed based on his or her watch history. This person shows no curiosity to intentionally search for other opinions. Given the lack of opposing perspectives in his or her online life, the cancellation of other opinions takes place in the background.

Religious views may be straight-jacketed by fundamentalist ideas made prominent by past behaviours. Such an echo chamber can lead to like-minded contacts creating online content. Normalisation of extreme acts can take place due to reading or watching similar content. Such content could have even been manipulated to become more persuasive. Cancellation of sensitivity to opposing views and people creeps in. A person can lose his or her identity and become a group thinker [9].

Consequently, radicalisation slowly crawls in. As research shows, even though the prevalence and threat levels are low in comparison to other forms of radicalisation,

“online radicalization, as a process dominated or entirely guided by Internet-related activity, does occur and poses a discernible threat.”[10]

Is Content Personalisation Not A Cancel Culture?

Thus, a more serious form of cancel culture is taking shape in various forms of online media platforms. They only aim to personalise every aspect of our online behaviour through algorithms trained by our past choices.

Obama muses that we cannot have confidence that

“any single individual or organization, private or public, should be in charge of determining who gets to hear what”.[8]

Unfortunate though it may be, such a culture can be further boosted by Big Tech’s increasing reliance on AI. Not focusing on this hidden cancel culture may become far more consequential than a public figure suffering some financial loss due to an onslaught of comments on a social media platform.

A Hope For The Future?

To avoid such biased feeds of information to us, the algorithms should be selecting, by default, some random information, perhaps based on external factors, say, location and time of the search rather than someone’s preferences. Allowing easy searches based on our past behaviour using filters should also be facilitated.

By doing the above, we are likely to reinforce our views over the opposing views, only if we intend to do so. We feed ourselves what we like not what is chosen by an outsider, perhaps, a programmer writing code for an IT establishment located somewhere oceans away.

Even though the above optionality is currently available to some extent, it seems to be not the norm but the exception. However, in a commercial world where money talks over human lives, this hope is still a far cry.

By canceling information to reach a balanced view of the world, the latter form of cancel culture can remain sneakily shaping our thoughts and behaviours.

The danger is that given our emphasis on a culture of lesser consequence, mainly financial, to affluent individuals, don’t we ignore the cancel culture of content personalisation that negatively affects humanity in many shapes and forms?

Bibliography

[1] Dershowitz, A (2020), Cancel Culture: The latest attack on Free Speech and Due Process, Skyhorse Publishing, New York

[2] Merriam-Webster, What it Means to Get “Canceled’,

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/cancel-culture-words-were-watching, Retrieved 21 Nov 2023

[3] A Letter on Justice and Open Debate, Harper’s magazine, 2020, https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/, Retrieved 21 Nov 2023

[4] Manavis, Sarah (2020) “Cancel culture” does not exist, New Statesman, https://web.archive.org/web/20200717045438/https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2020/07/cancel-culture-does-not-exist, Retrieved 21 Nov 2023

[5] Lawrence Summers, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers, Retrieved 23 Nov 2023

[6] Sarah Hagi (2019) Cancel Culture is Not Real — At Least Not in the Way People Think”, Time,

https://time.com/5735403/cancel-culture-is-not-real/ , Retrieved 21 Nov 2023

[7] Mark Halperin, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Halperin, Retrieved 21 Nov 2023

[8] Barak, Obama (2022) “Challenges to Democracy in The Digital Information Realm”, Address at Stanford Cyber Policy Centre.

https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/events/challenges-democracy-digital-information-realm

[9] Wolbers H et al. (2023) Understanding and preventing internet-facilitated radicalisation. Trends & issues in crime and criminal justice no. 673. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology. https://doi.org/10.52922/ti77024

[10] Binder JF, Kenyon J. (2022) Terrorism and the internet: How dangerous is online radicalization? Front Psychol. 2022 Oct 13;13:997390. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.997390. PMID: 36312087; PMCID: PMC9606324.

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