Cancel culture: the practice or tendency of engaging in mass canceling as a way of expressing disapproval and exerting social pressure.
Believe it or not, cancel culture is a term that has existed in our society since the year 2016. It’s got its own definition and plenty of example sentences and real-life scenarios to derive its meaning from. Yet, five years later I’m still questioning if the term actually functions like the verb it’s supposed to.
The usual pattern is that celebrity X or public personality X has either been caught stating or doing something non-remissible and exposed to social media, which then leads to the public outcry to “cancel” said person. But unfortunately, this “cancellation” rarely looks uniform and doesn’t metastasize beyond social media, and consequences towards the assailant are only temporary.
We can sit and debate the effectiveness of cancel culture until we’re blue in the face, but all the online bickering amongst one another only leaves us in the same position in which we started– online. Meanwhile, the institutions, systems and ideologies that generate such violent and harmful rhetoric are still at play. That, I believe, is where the focus should truly be.
The term cancel culture may be relatively new, but the ideas behind it are far from original. If anything, marginalized people have been the only demographic to actually try and make the term live up to its expectations. But this conflation between the word cancel and accountability, and the dense platform that is social media leaves no room for plausible actions.
Accountability calls for people to be held responsible for their actions and face the appropriate consequences that come. Meanwhile, cancel culture has been made this catchall term used to describe things from legitimate crimes to resurfaced tweets from years past. In the end, both situations not only lead to divisiveness, but the expansiveness of the word causes some issues to look illegitimate in comparison. This causes the requests from harmed marginalized communities to look invalid, to be deemed as sensitive and to never be truly heard.
Behind the dark screens and rapidly-typed Tweets, it’s hard to discern what are actual critiques versus those jumping on the bandwagon to reprimand someone. This cultural term is designed in such a way where we don’t always know people’s true intentions. Because sometimes people are more worried about their performance than the actual accountability they claim to be calling for.
This isn’t to say that those who call out public figures are all coming from a place of ill-will. I also don’t want to suggest that those who spread harmful rhetoric, hate speech and verbal abuse shouldn’t face backslash. And I’d be wrong if I didn’t admit that cancel culture hasn’t done any good. The accessibility and presentness it possesses have aided in mass mobilization for certain issues.
However, the larger conversations about which these issues stem from shouldn’t be discussed on the same social media platforms. Fighting battles for change are already hard enough when these large issues at hand are faceless. When the legacies of oppression are carried on by the masses and the figureheads being those in which we today have never met. Social media is not a place designed for nuance or full-length discussions on societal issues. If anything, it does our society a disservice to even attempt to have them there. Social media does not know our communities or our specific issues. While helpful as it can be to aid in community building, your goals at large cannot live on social media, nor can it hold them, and that is a good thing. Because at the end of the day, cancel culture has no elected leader, no organized plan, and therefore the outrage that exists will always be reactionary and stationary.
So with a culture that appears to be here to stay in our deeply polarized society, what does one truly do? I can’t sit here and say I have all the answers, but I do know this: ask yourself what are you fighting for, and what is the best way to do it. Unfortunately 9/10 times, celebrities and public figures will bounce back. Whether it be their access to capital or the performative activism that exists, their battle against the digital users will never be uphill. So, I ask that you unify with those you can see, those you can physically surround yourself with, and not those behind screens.