Cancel culture might have, at one time, focused on excluding actual Nazis, for instance - that is, actual white supremacists who call for the extermination of Jews, homosexuals, people of colour etc. Are we now at the stage where using the word "fat", for example, means a person can be labelled a "Nazi" and treated with the same kind of contempt and exclusion that would be given to an actual Nazi?
The simplicity dazzles. I honestly have no idea what that is supposed to mean, but something about its apparent parameters tells me more about how you view "cancel culture". That is,
¿Really? ¿"Fat"?
Okay, then. The discourse on fatness I'm aware of is apparently something else. "The same kind of contempt and exclusion that would be given to an actual Nazi"? This means something to you.
†
More generally, I sometimes wonder about the relationship of your rhetoric to what parts of reality inasmuch as it's all familiar rhetoric, but it doesn't necessarily seem to be attached to anything.
For instance, you ask, "Or is it once cancelled, forever cancelled?" The thing is, the range of what passes for cancellation is so broad that, while I can't find the endpoint out in one direction, I will before reaching the other pass through, maybe it was Chappelle who had occasion, around the time of his new special being released, to comment on how well cancellation had treated him. In general, the wildly diverse result would indicate that no, it is not always forever. But that's the thing; we come back to what passes for cancellation. Educators driven out of their jobs for the sake of CRT-panic conspiracy theories, for instance, are a different question than a celebrity who doubles down. Nonetheless, "once cancelled, forever cancelled", seems a bit histrionic; your question can be answered by looking around.
The Twitter lynch mob? That's a wildly diverse question. Two ends of a weird range:
Was the Slate Star implosion a matter of cancellation, silencing, &c.? It's a complicated mess, to be certain, but the political undercurrents of what led to what otherwise looks like a self-inflicted silencing only become important because of what they weren't. On the other end, a notorious website might well have met its end in recent days, but inasmuch as the danger its community posed to others was something the site knowingly accommodated, that is a fairly straightforward self-infliction.
I don't recall everything on the table in the SSC implosion because I picked it up after the fact. But part of what goes on in the cancel culture discussion is that some people have occasion to express an outlook that includes or implies a harmful circumstance for others, and those others, or their friends and allies, might object. There is also what we might call a complicating detail. When Slate Star Codex imploded by its creator's hand, the problem turned out to be that some of his clients who might become aware of his publicly-known nom de plume, and that could complicate and even ruin their professional relationship; it's both complicated and stupidly straightforward.
This is almost akin to a case you noted last year, the
sad tale of Justine Sacco↑, and
Bells↑ already made the point, so on that count you are answered:
Clearly not forever. But the really weird thing the whole cancel culture debate seems to overlook is a question of general and particular. The
Washington Post op-ed↱ Bells cited described Sacco as "a communications professional whose career (briefly) unraveled thanks to what they view as an idiotic mistake that anybody – including themselves – could make"; the column also describes her as a "public relations executive".
It's a term
you used↑, as well; she was "a PR executive", and you even added a parenthetic note highighting that she had "no special public profile". But what you and the op-ed author, Blanchfield, both overlook is something far more obvious.
Justine Sacco was a
public relations executive.
Blanchfield is not entirely wrong to read the symbols as he does, but more than her symbolic value within a projected empowerment framework,
Justine Sacco was a public relations executive.
Comparison: George Rekers is a psychologist of much controversy; his theses and methods are pseudoscience known to be dangerous to the clients. He even went so far as to start a political organization for health professionals who wanted to deviate from particular parts of science. As far as I know, he was never actually discredited, and remains in good standing as a psychologist. What actually destroyed him, so that we haven't heard much from him in over a decade, was a spectre of homosexuality. But before anyone rushes to his sympathetic defense, remember that it's not a question of being gay, or even hiring a sex worker. Rather, what destroyed the psychologist whose practice sought to disrupt and even quash homosexuality, who started a political organization for health professionals who wanted to help, was being all that and a virulently anti-gay Southern Baptist preacher who hired a rentboy for his European vacation. It's not because he might be gay, or hired a rentboy; it is in particular because he was a homophobic Southern Baptist preacher who used his professional credential as a psychologist to harm his clients, would go on to hire a gay sex worker. It is a particular alignment of factors that discredits him. Compared to any generic discussion of homosexuality or sex work, what harmed and apparently cancelled Rekers was the particular point that such behavior violated any number of particular standards about his particular credential and credibility. The people who wouldn't work with him, before, still won't work with him; what happened is that Rekers lost credibility with, and to some degree even humiliated, the people who would otherwise support and work with him.
Sacco's might be the sort of mistake that a proverbial anybody could make, but Blanchfield's hint toward accusing hypocrisy overlooks that the proverbial anybody is generally not going to be a
public relations executive.
A certain phrase in common use is to
read the room. Justine Sacco was an
executive in
public relations whose
job is to
read the room. Inasmuch as Blanchfield considers an idiotic mistake that anybody could make, Justine Sacco's
job was to
know better than making such idiotic mistakes.
Oh, and besides, Blanchfield's hint of accusation wasn't really about a proverbial anybody; he was suggesting and mitigating the sort of mistake that particular other people who also ought to know better,
i.e., "media types", might make.
The SSC implosion was the result of the author dealing with a major newspaper as his star rose. It's hard to tell if he just didn't think it through, but he is a mental health professional who spoke roughly of people in general in such ways that might rattle some of his clients. Having his name attached to those writings would, in his calculation, damage his credibility as a mental health professional, and it's simply true that his circumstance did not qualify for anonymity at the
New York Times.
The apparent destruction of KF is in part a result of twittery, but also social media and other comms software, in general. The membership of a website behaved dangerously, got called out, and chose to escalate in response; site ownership, administration, and moderation did not disrupt the dangerous behavior, and is accused of facilitating the problem. The site became too dangerous even for Cloudflare to host, and has been losing its international domains; in at least one loss, a national government has seized the domain.
It's a broad range, I suppose, and that's part of the point. A theme of self-infliction is important as well. There is an idea that goes, approximately,
"Could you please not?" What it means is best understood by considering the idea that "
everybody makes mistakes, at some time or other": As we watch what happens next, as someone is called out, it might occur that we say,
「Yes, we understand that you are not [___], but as the question is afoot, could you please not behave the [___s] do, and say what they say?」
So: "Are we now at the stage where using the word 'fat', for example, means a person can be labelled a 'Nazi' and treated with the same kind of contempt and exclusion that would be given to an actual Nazi?"
Compared to the fat guy who uses the word "fat" in both work and casual discussion, and also advocates for fat acceptance in society, the idea that "using the word 'fat'", in and of itself, leads to someone being "labelled a 'Nazi' and treated with the same kind of contempt and exclusion that would be given to an actual Nazi", is really, really weird. That is: Compared to the discourse around me, there must be more to it.
____________________
Notes:
Blanchfield, Patrick. "Twitter’s outrage machine should be stopped. But Justine Sacco is the wrong poster child." The Washington Post. 24 Ferbruary 2015. WashingtonPost.com. 13 September 2022. https://wapo.st/3xniMI2
