The Cancel Train

All aboard the Cancel Culture Train.

Call-out Culture

Cancel culture originated from the “call-out culture” on twitter. Calling-out is drawing attention to perpetrators It started out by confronting heavy issues, mostly relating to sexual assault and harassment. We first saw this trend in the music culture, from people tweeting things like “cancel R-Kelly” or “#MuteRKelly” in July of 2017 in response to his sexual assault accusations.

Next, a bulk of allegations towards Harvey Weinstein were made. Alyssa Milano posted on Twitter, “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.”  Several women came out with their #MeToo stories. The notion of exposing the oppressors and perpetrators through call-out culture  lead to the friction #MeToo movement October 15, 2017.

This was a healthy way to start conversation, facilitate empowerment and community for the victims. Not only did it start a trend to hold people of influence accountable for their actions, it laid the foundation for women to stand up and speak out against their #MeToo stories together. However, a shift in the rhetoric has lead society from this well-intended action to the more toxic notion of Cancel Culture.

Cancel Culture

Canceling is online phenomenon of rejecting, shaming and ostracizing a member of a community with a mob mentality. It results in manipulating one story into another, more dramatic story. Typically, it starts when a person of social standing is exposed by the masses for an inappropriate, insensitive or offensive behavior. Essentially, it’s an extreme vigilante approach of boycotting and humiliation.

YouTuber ContraPoints made a video “Canceling” that explains how a comment makes its evolution from the Call-Out Culture to Cancel Culture. She explains this process through three Cancel Culture Tropes: Presumption of Guilt, Abstraction and Essentialism.

Presumption of Guilt is the belief that one is considered guilt unless proven innocent. This idea is exact opposite of Justice in the United States where one is considered innocent unless proven guilty. Next, Abstraction replaces the specific, concrete details of a claim. Here, the presumption of guilt becomes generalized to a characteristic of a person’s action. The final stage of Cancel Culture is Essentialism. This is shifting from criticizing a person’s action to criticizing the person themselves i.e. the biggest cancel of 2019: James Charles.

Further, there has been a shift in what people deem worthy of calling-out and the attitudes people have towards people who are #cancelled. So, rather than being an empowering movement, it is now just a giant hate train that bulldozes through people with no mercy. People nitpick for potentially controversy issues to instantly cancel people out of relevance with no questions, and no exceptions. This makes it hard for influences to redeem their social identity. Even if they make’s a sincere apology, it isn’t good enough for the Cancel Culture to accept.

The Spreading of Cancel Culture 

What is Spreadable media? You know what it is to go viral, right? Well it’s along those lines but without the negative connotation behind it. In Spreadable Media, Henry Jenkins says that we can think about spreadable media in the same terms that you spread you peanut butter and jelly across the bread. But with, media content and networks of friends, family and strangers across the web. In the simplest definition, it’s how media gets circulated so rapidly.

Jenkins explores the idea of spreadablity as a virus. We are all susceptible hosts to spreading content across media like click-borne contagions. If normal, innocent media is spreading faster than we dream of controlling, then that means so is the toxic, wrong informed, ill-intentioned media. And it’s always the black and white fallacies who are the first to reach their fame. We all know that the juicier the drama is, the better… am I right?

Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, Associate Professor at the Brain and Creativity Institution at USC explains that people make reactions videos because mirror neutrons allow people to reciprocate the emotions of the content they are watching. This connection to the content fills the void lacking human connection. So, we know what happens when people like content. But what happens when people don’t like what they see?

Naturally, cognitive dissonance arises when our values contradicted the values being communicated by others. Popneuro’s article, The Psychology Behind Cancel Culture says that we can resolve this tension in two ways:

•   By sticking with the celebrity and changing your values

•   By sticking with our values and changing our allegiance with the individual.

Our values are much harder to change so, almost always, without question, people choose to change their relationship to the celebrity. They become infected zombie-like, reputation eaters. They jump on the cancel train and spread traces of hate one click at a time.  And there’s no turning back in Cancel Culture. It’s all or nothing.

The Golden Rule

This shift in rhetoric and attitude towards people who society deems as #canceled has eliminated the opportunity for healthy confrontation and conversation. It is appropriate and necessary to hold people of influence accountable for their actions. But by doing this through Cancel Culture only adds fire to the flame. Especially with consideration that media’s model of circulation is like a virus.

Rather than increasing their engagement by feeding into the Cancel Culture, why don’t you simply raise awareness of the issue? Rather, than aiming to cancel people, why don’t you just ignore them? Or just keep your opinion to yourself.

People make mistakes unintentionally and sometimes intentionally. But the point is, is that these are people too. Don’t you remember the Golden Rule? Treat people how you want to be treated.

Will you second guess yourself next time the Cancel Train arrives on your feed?