Sometimes human beings are unpleasant, and certain platforms are designed to bring out the worst in them. Being piled on online is nasty, but it is broadly a function of how social media in particular and the internet in general has enabled bullying for the hell of it. It raises interesting questions, but these are more about employment rights and the encroachment by bosses into areas of private opinion and conduct. Companies hastily sacking people who have been mobbed online is about the bottom line and fear of bad PR. Because outrage about cancel culture can’t be credibly sustained when you start breaking down what it actually consists of. In my view, the failure to make these distinctions clear is probably less an oversight and more of a convenient fudge. The new climate of “censoriousness”, if there is one, cannot be diagnosed and dispatched this easily. The fact is that decisions made by corporate HR departments, failings in editing processes at media organisations such as the New York Times, and the demands of movements for social justice to be accorded recognition and respect do not constitute one clear trend.
It’s puzzling to me that a statement signed by a group of writers, thinkers and journalists, most whom have Ivy League or other prestigious credentials, would fail to at least establish a coherent definition of what it believes cancel culture is before seeming to condemn it. The idea of “ cancel culture”, the obvious, albeit unnamed, target of this letter, collapses several different phenomena under one pejorative label.
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